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> LECTURE S 



'■-v. 



DRAMATIC LITERATUEE 



OP THE 



AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



BY WILLIAM HAZLITT. 



NEW-YORK: 
WILEY AND PUTNAM, 161 BROADWAY. 

1845. 






By Transfer 

D'C. I'ui^tic libivy 

JUN ? :. 1934 




L 



AS A TRIBUTE 

TO PUBLIC VIRTUE AND PRIVATE WORTH, 

AND AS A MEMORIAL OF LONG AND TRIED FRIENDSHIP, 

THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED, IN THE 

NAME OF ITS AUTHOR, 

TO 

BASIL MONTAG[J. 



CONTENTS. 



LECTURE I. 

PAGE 

Introductory. — General View of the Subject 1 

LECTURE 11. 

On the Dramatic Writers contemporary with Shakspeare, Lyly, Mar- 
lowe, Hey wood. Middleton, and Rowley 22 

LECTURE III. 
On Marston, Chapman, Decker, and Webster 57 

LECTURE IV. 
On Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Ford, and Massinger 85 

LECTURE V. 

On single Plays, Poems, &;c,, the Four P's, the Return from Parnassus, 
Gammer Gurton's Needle, and other Works 115 

LECTURE VI. 

On Miscellaneous Poems, F. Beaumont, P. Fletcher, Drayton, Daniel, 
&;c., Sir P, Sidney's Arcadia, and Sonnets 138 

LECTURE VII. 

Character of Lord Bacon's Works— compared as to style with Sir Thos. 
Brown and Jeremy Taylor 174 

LECTURE VIII. 

On the Spirit of Ancient and Modern Literature— on the German Drama, 
contrasted witli that of the Age of Elizabeth^. 195 



ADVERTISEMENT TO THE LAST LONDON EDITION, 



BY THE AUTHOR'S SON. 



The former editions of the Lectures, originally delivered by the 
author at the Surrey Institution in 1818, and published in the 
same year, having become exhausted, the present reprint has 
been undertaken, for the purpose of supplying the constant and 
increasing demand which is made for it. 

There is no feature in the retrospect of the last few years, 
more important and more delightful than the steady advance of 
an improved taste in literature : and both as a cause and as a 
consequence of this, the works of William Hazlitt, which hereto- 
fore have been duly appreciated only by the few, are now having 
ample justice done them by the many. With reference to the 
present work, the Edinburgh Review eloquently observes, " Mr. 
Hazlitt possesses one noble quality at least for the office which 
he has chosen, in the intense admiration and love which he feels 
for the great authors on whose excellencies he chiefly dwells. 
His relish for their beauties is so keen, that while he describes 
them, the pleasures which they impart become almost palpable 
to the sense, and we seem, scarcely in a figure, to feast and ban- 
quet on their 'nectared sweets.' He introduces us almost cor- 
porally into the divine presence of the great of old time — enables 
us to hear the living oracles of wisdom drop from their lips — and 
makes us partakers, not only of those joys which they diffused, 
but of those which they felt in the inmost recesses of their souls. 
He draws aside the veil of time with a hand tremulous with 



PUBLISHERS' ADVERTISEMENT. 



mingled delight and reverence ; and descants with kindling en- 
thusiasm, on all the delicacies of that picture of genius which he 
discloses. His intense admiration of intellectual beauty seems 
always to sharpen his critical faculties. He perceives it, by a 
kind of intuitive power, how deeply soever it may be buried in 
rubbish ; and separates it in a moment from all that would en- 
cumber or deface it. At the same time, he exhibits to us those 
hidden sources of beauty, not like an anatomist, but like a lover. 
He does not coolly dissect the form to show the springs whence 
the blood flows all eloquent, and the divine expression is kindled ; 
but makes us feel in the sparkling or softened eye, the wreathed 
smile, and the tender bloom. In a word, he at once analyzes 
and describes — so that our enjoyments of loveliness are not 
chilled, but brightened by our acquaintance with their inward 
sources. The knowledge communicated in his lectures breaks 
no sweet enchantment, nor chills one feeling of youthful joy. 
His criticisms, while they extend our insight into the causes of 
poetical excellence, teach us, at the same time, more keenly to 
enjoy, and more fondly to revere it." 



LECTURES 



ON THE 



AGE OF ELIZABETH, &c. 



LECTURE I.— INTRODUCTORY. 

General View of the Subject. 

The age of Elizabeth was distinguished, beyond, perhaps, any 
other in our history, by a number of great men, famous in differ- 
ent ways, and whose names have come down to us with unblem- 
ished honours ; statesmen, warriors, divines, scholars, poets, and 
philosophers, Raleigh, Drake, Coke, Hooker, and higher and more 
sounding still, and still more frequent in our mouths, Shakspeare, 
Spenser, Sidney, Bacon, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, men 
whom fame has eternized in her long and lasting scroll, and who 
by their words and acts were benefactors of their country, and 
ornaments of human nature. Their attainments of different kinds 
bore the same general stamp, and was sterling : what they did 
had the mark of their age and country upon it. Perhaps the 
genius of Great Britain (if I may so speak without offence or 
flattery) never shone out fuller or brighter, or looked more like 
itself, than at this period. Our writers and great men had some- 
thing in them that savoured of the soil from which they grew : 
they were not French, they were not Dutch, or German, or 
Greek, or Latin ; they were truly English. They did not look 
out of themselves to see what they should be ; they sought for 
truth and nature, and found it in themselves. There was no 
tinsel, and but little art ; they were not the spoiled children of 
affectation and refinement, but a bold, vigorous, independent race 
of thinkers, with prodigious strength and energy, with none but 



THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



natoral grace, and heartfell, unobtrusive delicacy. They were 
not at all sophisticated. The mind of their country was great in 
them, and it prevailed. With their learning and unexampled 
acquirement they did not forget that they were men : with all 
their endeavours after excellence, they did not lay aside the 
strong original bent and character of their minds. What they 
performed was chiefly nature's handiwork ; and time has claimed 
it for his own. — To these, however, might be added others not 
less learned, nor with a scarce less happy vein, but less fortunate 
in the event, who, though as renowned in their day, have sunk 
into " mere oblivion," and of whom the only record (but that the 
noblest) is to be found in their works. Their works and their 
names, " poor, poor, dumb names," are all that remains of such 
men as Webster, Decker, Marston, Marlowe, Chapman, Hey- 
wood, Middleton, and Rowley ! " How lov'd, how honour'd 
once avails them not :" though they were the friends and fellow- 
labourers of Shakspeare, sharing his fame and fortunes with him, 
the rivals of Jonson, and the masters of Beaumont and Fletcher's 
well-sung woes ! They went out one by one unnoticed, like 
evening lights ; or were swallowed up in the headlong torrent of 
puritanic zeal which succeeded, and swept away everything in 
its unsparing course, throwing up the wrecks of taste and genius 
at random, and at long fitful intervals, amidst the painted gew- 
gaws and foreign frippery of the reign of Charles II., and from 
which we are only now recovering the scattered fragments and 
broken images to erect a temple to true Fame ! How long before 
it will be completed ? 

If I can do anything to rescue some of these writers from hope- 
less obscurity, and to do them right, without prejudice to well- 
deserved reputation, I shall have succeeded, in what I chiefly 
propose. I shall not attempt, indeed, to adjust the spelling, or 
restore the pointing, as if the genius of poetry lay hid in errors 
of the press, but leaving these weightier matters of criticism to 
those who are more able and willing to bear the burden, try 
to bring out their real beauties to the eager sight, " draw the 
curtain of Time, and show the picture of Genius," restraining my 
own admiration within reasonable bounds. 

There is not a lower ambition, a poorer way of thought, than 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 



that which would confine all excellence, or arrogate its final ac- 
complishment to the present, or modern times. We ordinarily 
speak and think of those who had the misfortune to write or live 
before us, as labouring under very singular privations and disad- 
vantages in not having the benefit of those improvements which 
we have made, as buried in the grossest ignorance, or the slaves 
" of poring pedantry ;'*' and we make a cheap and infallible esti- 
mate of their progress in civilization upon a graduated scale of 
perfectibility, calculated from the meridian of our own times. If 
we have pretty well got rid of the narrow bigotry that would 
limit all sense or virtue to our own country, and have frater- 
nized, like true cosmopolites, with our neighbours and contempo- 
raries, we have made our self-love amends by letting the genera- 
tion we live in engross nearly all our admiration, and by pro- 
nouncing a sweeping sentence of barbarism and ignorance on our 
ancestry backwards, from the commencement (as near as can be) 
of the nineteenth, or the latter end of the eighteenth century. 
From thence we date a new era, the dawn of our own intellect, 
and that of the world, like " the sacred influence of light" glim- 
mering on the confines of " Chaos and old night ;" new manners 
rise, and all the cumbrous " pomp of elder days" vanishes, and 
is lost in worse than Gothic darkness. Pavilioned in the glitter- 
ing pride of our superficial accomplishments and upstart preten- 
sions, we fancy that everything beyond that magic circle is pre- 
judice and error ; and all, before the present enlightened period, 
but a dull and useless blank in the great map of time. We are 
so dazzled with the gloss and novelty of modern discoveries, that 
we cannot take into our mind's eye the vast expanse, the length- 
ened perspective of human intellect, and a cloud hangs over and 
conceals its loftiest monuments, if they are removed to a little 
distance from us — the cloud of our vanity and short-sightedness. 
The modern sciolist stultifies all understanding but his own, and 
that which he conceives like his own. We think, in this age of 
reason and consummation of philosophy, because we knew nothing 
twenty or thirty years ago, and began then to think for the first 
time in our lives, that the rest of mankind were in the same pre- 
dicament, and never knew anything till we did ; that the world 
had grown old in sloth and ignorance, had dreamt out its long 



THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



minority of five thousand years in a dozing state, and that it first 
began to wake out of sleep, to rouse itself, and look about it, 
startled by the light of our unexpected discoveries, and the noise 
we made about them. Strange error of our infatuated self-love. 
Because the clothes we remember to have seen worn when we 
were children are now out of fashion, and our grandmothers were 
then old women, we conceive, with magnanimous continuity of 
reasoning, that it must have been much worse three hundred 
years before, and that grace, youth, and beauty are things of 
modern date — as if nature had ever been old, or the sun had first 
shone on our folly and presumption. Because, in a word, the 
last o-eneration, when tottering off the stage, were not so active, 
so sprightly, and so promising as we were, we begin to imagine 
that people formerly must have crawled about in a feeble, torpid 
state, like flies in winter, in a sort of dim twilight of the under- 
standing; "nor can we think what thoughts they could conceive," 
in the absence of all those topics that so agreeably enliven and 
diversify our conversation and literature, mistaking the imperfec- 
tion of our knowledge for the defect of their organs, as if it was 
necessary for us to have a register and certificate of their thoughts, 
or as if, because they did not see with our eyes, hear with our 
ears, and understand with our understandings, they could hear, 
see, and understand nothing. A falser inference could not be 
drawn, nor one more contrary to the maxims and cautions of a 
wise humanity. " Think," says Shakspeare, the prompter of 
good and true feelings, "there's livers out of Britain." So there 
have been thinkers, and great and sound ones, before our time. 
They had the same capacities that we have, sometimes greater 
motives for their exertion, and for the most part, the same subject- 
matter to work upon. What we learn from nature, we may hope 
to do as well as they ; what we learn from them we may in gen- 
eral expect to do worse. — What is, I think, as likely as anything 
to cure us of this overweening admiration of the present, and un- 
mingled contempt for past times, is the looking at the finest old 
pictures ; at Raphael's heads, at Titian's faces, at Claude's land- 
scapes. We have there the evidence of the senses, without the 
alterations of opinion or disguise of language. We there see the 
blood circulate through the veins (long before it was known that 
% 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 



it did so), the same red and white " by nature's own sweet and 
cu|tning hand laid on," the same thoughts passing through the 
mind and seated on the lips, the same blue sky, and glittering 
sunny vales, " where Pan, knit with the Graces and the Hours in 
dance, leads on the eternal spring." And we begin to feel that 
nature and the mind of man are not a thing of yesterday, as we 
had been led to suppose ; and that " there are more things be- 
tween heaven and earth than were ever dreamt of in our philoso- 
phy." — Or grant that we improve, in some respects, in a uni- 
formly progressive ratio, and build. Babel-high, on the foundation 
of other men's knowledge, as in matters of science and specula- 
tive inquiry, where, by going often over the same general ground, 
certain general conclusions have been arrived at, and in the 
number of persons reasoning on a given subject, truth has at last 
been hit upon, and long-established error exploded ; yet this does 
not apply to cases of individual power and knowledge, to a million 
of things besides, in which we are still to seek as much as ever, 
and in which we can only hope to find, by going to the fountain- 
head of thought and experience. We are quite wrong in sup- 
posing (as we are apt to do), that we can plead an exclusive title 
to wit and wisdom, to taste and genius, as the net produce and 
clear reversion of the age we live in, and that all we have to 
do to be great is to despise those who have gone before us as 
nothing. 

Or even if we admit a saving clause in this sweeping pro- 
scription, and do not make the rule absolute, the very nature of 
the exception shows the spirit in which they are made. We 
single out one or two striking instances, say Shakspeare or Lord 
Bacon, which we would fain treat as prodigies, and as a marked 
contrast to the rudeness and barbarism that surrounded them. 
These we delight to dwell upon and magnify ; the praise and 
wonder we heap upon their shrines are at the expense of the 
time in which they lived, and would leave it poor indeed. We 
make them out something more than human, " matchless, di- 
vine, what we will," so to make them no rule for their age, and 
no infringement of the abstract claim to superiority which we 
set up. Instead of letting them reflect any lustre, or add any 
credit to the period of history to which they rightfully belong. 



THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



we only make use of their example to insult and degrade it still 
more beneath our own level. 

It is the present fashion to speak with veneration of old English 
literature ; but the homage we pay to it is more akin to the rites 
of superstition than to the worship of true religion. Our faith 
is doubtful ; our love cold ; our knowledge little or none. We 
now and then repeat the names of some of the old writers by 
rote, but we are shy of looking into their works. Though we 
seem disposed to think highly of them, and to give them every 
credit for a masculine and original vein of thought, as a matter 
of literary courtesy and enlargement of taste, we are afraid of 
coming to the proof, as too great a trial of our candour and pa- 
tience. We regard the enthusiastic admiration of these obsolete 
authors, or a desire to make proselytes to a belief in their extra- 
ordinary merits, as an amiable weakness, a pleasing delusion ; 
and prepare to listen to some favourite passage, that may be re- 
ferred to in support of this singular taste, with an incredulous 
smile ; and are in no small pain for the result of the hazardous 
experiment ; feeling much the same awkward condescending 
disposition to patronize these first crude attempts at poetry and 
lispings of the Muse, as when a fond parent brings forward a 
bashful child to make a display of its wit or learning. We 
hope the best, put a good face on the matter, but are sadly afraid 
the thing cannot answer. — Dr. Johnson said of these WTiters 
generally, that "they were sought after because they were 
scarce, and would not have been scarce had they been much es- 
teemed." His decision is neither true history nor sound criti- 
cism. They were esteemed, and they deserved to be so. 

One cause that might be pointed out here, as having contri- 
buted to the long-continued neglect of our earlier writers, lies 
in the very nature of our academic institutions, which unavoid- 
ably neutralizes a taste for the productions of native genius, es- 
tranges the mind from the history of our own literature, and 
makes it in each successive age like a book sealed. The Greek 
and Roman classics are a sort of privileged text-books, the stand- 
ing order of the day, in a University education, and leave little 
leisure for a competent acquaintance with, or due admiration of, 
a whole host of able writers of our own, who are suffered to 



GENERAL VIEW OP THE SUBJECT. 



moulder in obscurity on the shelves of our libraries, with a de- 
cent reservation of one or two top-names, that are cried up for 
form's sake, and to save the national character. Thus we keep 
a few of these always ready in capitals, and strike off the rest 
to prevent the tendency to a superfluous population in the repub- 
lic of letters ; in other words, to prevent the writers from be- 
coming more numerous than the readers. The ancients are be- 
come effete in this respect, they no longer increase and multiply ; 
or if they have imitators among us, no one is expected to read, 
and still less to admire them. It is not possible that the learned 
professors and the reading public should clash in this way, or 
necessary for them to use any precautions against each other. 
But it is not the same with the living languages, where there is 
danger of being overwhelmed by the crowd of competitors, and 
pedantry has combined with ignorance to cancel their unsatisfied 
claims. 

We affect to wonder at Shakspeare, and one or two more of 
that period, as solitary instances upon record ; whereas it is our 
own dearth of information that makes the waste ; for there is no 
time more populous of intellect, or more prolific of intellectual 
wealth, than the one we are speaking of. Shakspeare did not 
look upon himself in this light, as a sort of monster of poetical 
genius, or on his contemporaries as " less than smallest dwarfs," 
when he speaks with true, not false modesty, of himself and 
them, and of his wayward thoughts, " desiring this man's art, 
and that man's scope." We fancy that there were no such men, 
that could either add to or take anything away from him, but 
such there were. He indeed overlooks and commands the admi- 
ration of posterity, but he does it from the tahle-land of the age 
in which he lived. He towered above his fellows, " in shape 
and gesture proudly eminent," but he was one of a race of 
giants, the tallest, the strongest, the most graceful, and beautiful 
of them ; but it was a common and a noble brood. He was not 
something sacred and aloof from the vulgar herd of men, but 
shook hands with nature and the circumstances of the time, and 
is distinguished from his immediate contemporaries, not in kind, 
but in degree and greater variety of excellence. He did not 
form a class or species by himself, but belonged to a class or 



THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



species. His age was necessary to him; nor could he have 
been wrenched from his place in the edifice of which he was so 
conspicuous a part, without equal injury to himself and it. Mr. 
Wordsworth says of Milton, that "his soul was like a star, 
and dwelt apart." This cannot be said with any propriety of 
Shakspeare, who certainly moved in a constellation of bright 
luminaries, and " drew after him a third part of the heavens." 
If we allow, for argument's sake (or for truth's, which is better), 
that he was in himself equal to all his competitors put together ; 
yet there was more dramatic excellence in that age than in the 
whole of the period that has elapsed since. If his contempo- 
raries, with their united strength, would hardly make one Shaks- 
peare, certain it is that all his successors would not make half a 
one. With the exception of a single writer, Otway, and of a 
single play of his (' Venice Preserved'), there is nobody in tra- 
gedy and dramatic poetry (I do not here speak of comedy), to be 
compared to the great men of the age of Shakspeare, and im- 
mediately after. They are a mighty phalanx of kindred spirits 
closing him round, moving in the same orbit, and impelled by the 
same causes in their whirling and eccentric career. They had 
the same faults and the same excellences ; the same strength, 
and depth, and richness, the same truth of character, passion, 
imagination, thought and language, thrown, heaped, massed to- 
gether without careful polishing or exact method, but poured out 
in unconcerned profusion from the lap of nature and genius in 
boundless and unrivalled magnificence. The sweetness of 
Decker, the thought of Marston, the gravity of Chapman, the 
grace of Fletcher and his young-eyed wit, Jonson's learned sock, 
the flowing vein of Middleton, Heywood's ease, the pathos of 
Webster, and Marlowe's deep designs, add a double lustre to the 
sweetness, thought, gravity, grace, wit, artless nature, copious- 
ness, ease, pathos, and sublime conceptions of Shakspeare 's 
Muse. They are indeed the scale by which we can best ascend 
to the true knowledge and love of him. Our admiration of them 
does not lessen our relish for him : but, on the contrary, increases 
and confirms it. For such an extraordinary combination and 
development of fancy and genius many causes may be assigned, 
and we seek for the chief of them in religion, in politics, in the 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 



circumstances of the time, the recent diffusion of letters, in local 
situation, and in the character of the men who adorned that 
period, and availed themselves so nobly of the advantages placed 
within their reach. 

I shall here attempt to give a general sketch of these causes, 
and of the manner in which they operated to mould and stamp the 
poetry of the country at the period of which I have to treat ; in- 
dependently of incidental and fortuitous causes, for which there 
is no accounting, but which, after all, have often the greatest share 
in determining the most important results. 

The first cause I shall mention, as contributing to this general 
effect, was the Reformation, which had just then taken place. 
This event gave a mighty impulse, and increased activity to 
thought and inquiry, and agitated the inert mass of accumulated 
prejudices throughout Europe. The effect of the concussion was 
general, but the shock was greatest in this country. It toppled 
down the full-grown, intolerable abuses of centuries at a blow ; 
heaved the ground from under the feet of bigoted faith and slav- 
ish obedience ; and the roar and dashing of opinions, loosened 
from their accustomed hold, might be heard like the noise of an 
angry sea, and has never yet subsided. Germany first broke 
the spell of misbegotten fear, and gave the watchword ; but 
England joined the shout, and echoed it back with her island 
voice from her thousand cliffs and craggy shores, in a longer and 
a louder strain. With that cry the genius of Great Britain rose 
and threw down the gauntlet to the nations. There was a mighty 
fermentation : the waters were out ; public opinion was in a 
state of projection. Liberty was held out to all to think and 
speak the truth. Men's brains were busy ; their spirits stirring ; 
their hearts full ; and their hands not idle. Their eyes were 
open to expect the greatest things, and their ears burned with cu- 
riosity and zeal to know the truth, that the truth might make them 
free. The death-blow which had been struck at scarlet vice 
and bloated hypocrisy loosened their tongues, and made the talis- 
mans and love-tokens of Popish superstition, with which she had 
beguiled her followers and committed abominations with the peo- 
ple, fall harmless from their necks. 

The translation of the Bible was the chief engine in the great 
3 



10 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



work. It threw open, by a secret spring, the rich treasures of 
religion and morality, which had been there locked up as in a 
shrine. It revealed the visions of the prophets, and conveyed the 
lessons of inspired teachers (such they were thought) to the 
meanest of the people. It gave them a common interest in the 
common cause. Their hearts burnt within them as they read. 
It gave a mind to the people, by giving them common subjects of 
thought and feeling. It cemented their union of character and 
sentiment : it created endless diversity and collision of opinion. 
They found objects to employ their faculties, and a motive in the 
mafrnitude of the consequences attached to them, to exert the utmost 
eagerness in the pursuit of truth, and the most daring intrepidity in 
maintainino- it. Religious controversy sharpens the understand- 
ing by the subtlety and remoteness of the topics it discusses, and 
braces the will by their infinite importance. We perceive in 
the history of this period a nervous masculine intellect. No 
levity, no feebleness, no indifference ; or if there were, it is a 
relaxation from the intense activity which gives a tone to its 
general character. But there is a gravity approaching to piety ; 
a seriousness of impression, a conscientious severity of argu- 
ment, an habitual fervour and enthusiasm in their mode of han- 
dling almost every subject. The debates of the schoolmen were 
sharp and subtle enough ; but they wanted interest and grandeur, 
and were, besides, confined to a few : they did not affect the gene- 
ral mass of the community. But the Bible was thrown open to 
all ranks and conditions " to run and read," with its wonderful 
• table of contents from Genesis to the Revelations. Every vil- 
lage in England would present the scene so well described in 
Burns's Cotter's Saturday Night. I cannot think that all this va- 
riety and weight of knowledge could be thrown in all at once 
upon the mind of a people, and not* make some impression upon 
it, the traces of which might be discerned in the manners and 
literature of the age. For, to leave more disputable points, and 
take only the historical parts of the Old Testament, or the moral 
sentiments of the New, there is nothing like them in the power 
of exciting awe and admiration, or of rivetting sympathy. We 
see what Milton has made of the account of the Creation, from 
the manner in which he has treated it, imbued and impregnated 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 11 

with the spirit of the time of which we speak. Or what is there 
equal (in that romantic interest and patriarchal simplicity which 
goes to the heart of a country, and rouses it, as it were, from its 
lair in wastes and wildnesses) to the story of Joseph and his Breth- 
ren, of Rachael and Laban, of Jacob's Dream, of Ruth and 
Boaz, the descriptions in the book of Job, the deliverance of the 
Jews out of Egypt, or the account of their captivity and return 
from Babylon ? There is in all these parts of the Scripture, 
and numberless more of the same kind, to pass over the Orphic 
hymns of David, the prophetic denunciations of Isaiah, or the 
gorgeous visions of Ezekiel, an originality, a vastness of con- 
ception, a depth and tenderness of feeling, and a touching simpli- 
city in the mode of narration, which he who does not feel must 
be made of no " penetrable stuff." There is something in the 
character of Christ too (leaving religious faith quite out of the 
question) of more sweetness and majesty, and more likely to work 
a change in the mind of man, by the contemplation of its idea 
alone, than any to be found in history, whether actual or feigned. 
This character is that of a sublime humanity, such as was never 
seen on earth before nor since. This shone manifestly both in his 
words and actions. We see it in his washing the disciples' feet 
the night before his death, that unspeakable instance of humility 
and love, "above all art, all meanness, and all pride;" and in 
the leave he took of them on that occasion, " My peace I give 
unto you : that peace which the world cannot give, give I unto 
you ;" and in his last commandment, that " they should love one 
another." Who can read the account of his behaviour on the 
cross, when turning to his mother he said, " Woman, behold thy 
son," and to the disciple John, " Behold thy mother," and " from 
that hour that disciple took her to his own home," without having 
his heart smote within him ? We see it in his treatment of the 
woman taken in adultery, and in his excuse for the woman who 
poured precious ointment on his garment as an offering of devo- 
tion and love, which is here all in all. His religion was the re- 
ligion of the heart. We see it in his discourse with the disciples 
as they walked together towards Emmaus, when their hearts 
burned within them ; in his sermon from the Mount, in his para- 
ble of the good Samaritan, and in that of the Prodigal Son — in 



12 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



every act and word of his life, a grace, a mildness, a dignity of 
love, a patience and wisdom worthy of the Son of God. His 
whole life and being were imbued, steeped in this word, charity ; 
it was the spring, the well-head from which every thought and 
feeling gushed into act ; and it was this that breathed a mild 
glory from his face in that last agony upon the cross, " when the 
meek Saviour bowed his head and died," praying for his enemies. 
He was the first true teacher of morality ; for he alone conceived 
the idea of a pure humanity. He redeemed man from the wor- 
ship of that idol, self, and instructed him by precept and ex- 
ample to love his neighbour as himself, to forgive our enemies, to 
do good to those that curse us and despitefully use us. He taught 
the love of good for the sake of good, without regard to personal 
or sinister views, and made the affections of the heart the sole 
seat of morality, instead of the pride of the understanding or the 
sternness of the will. In answering the question, " who is our 
neighbour ?" as one who stands in need of our assistance, and 
whose wounds we can bind up, he has done more to humanize 
the thoughts and tame the unruly passions, than all who have 
tried to reform and benefit mankind. The very idea of abstract 
benevolence, of the desire to do good because another wants our 
services, and of regarding the human race as one family, the 
offspring of one common parent, is hardly to be found in any 
other code or system. It was " to the Jews a stumbling block, 
and to the Greeks foolishness." The Greeks and Romans 
never thought of considering others, but as they were Greeks 
or Romans, as they were bound to them by certain positive 
ties, or, on the other hand, as separated from them by fiercer 
antipathies. Their virtues were the virtues of political ma- 
chines, their vices were the vices of demons, ready to inflict 
or endure pain with obdurate and remorseless inflexibility of 
purpose. But in the Christian religion, " we perceive a soft- 
ness coming over the heart of a nation, and the iron scales 
that fence and harden it, melt and drop off." It becomes mal- 
leable, capable of pity, of forgiveness, of relaxing in its claims, 
and remitting its power. We strike it, and it does not hurt us : 
it is not steel or marble, but flesh and blood, clay tempered with 
tears, and " soft as sinews of the new-born babe." The gospel 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 13 



was first preached to the poor, for it consulted their wants and 
interests, not its own pride and arrogance. It first promulgated 
the equality of mankind in the community of duties and benefits. 
It denounced the iniquities of the chief priests and pharisees, and 
declared itself at variance with principalities and powers, for it 
sympathizes not with the oppressor, but the oppressed. It first 
abolished slavery, for it did not consider the power of the will 
to inflict injury, as clothing it with a right to do so. Its law is 
good, not power. It at the same time tended to wean the mind 
from the grossness of sense, and a particle of its divine flame 
was lent to brighten and purify the lamp of love ! 

There have been persons who, being sceptics as to the divine 
mission of Christ, have taken an accountable prejudice to his 
doctrines, and have been disposed to deny the merit of his charac- 
ter ; but this was not the feeling of the great men in the age of 
Elizabeth (whatever might be their belief,) one of whom says of 
him, with a boldness equal to its piety : 

" The best of men 
That e'er wore earth about him, was a sufferer ; 
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit ; 
The first true gentleman that ever breathed." 

This was old honest Decker, and the lines ought to embalm 
his memory to every one who has a sense either of religion, or 
philosophy, or humanity, or true genius. Nor can I help think- 
ing, that we may discern the traces of the influence exerted by 
religious faith in the spirit of the poetry of the age of Elizabeth, 
in the means of exciting terror and pity, in the delineation of the 
passions of grief, remorse, love, sympathy, the sense of shame, 
in the fond desires, the longings after immortality, in the heaven 
of hope, and the abyss of despair it lays open before us.* 

The literature of this age, then, I would say, was strongly in- 
fluenced (among other causes,) first by the spirit of Christianity, 
and secondly, by the spirit of Protestantism. 

The effects of the Reformation on politics and philosophy may 

* In some Roman Patholic countries, pictures in part supplied the place 
of the translation of the Bible : and this dumb art arose in the silence of the 
wiitten oracles. 



14 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



be seen in the writings and history of the next and of the follow- 
ing ages. They are still at work, and will continue to be so. 
The effects on the poetry of the time were chiefly confined to the 
moulding of the character, and giving a powerful impulse to the 
intellect of the country. The immediate use or application that 
was made of religion to subjects of imagination and fiction was 
not (from an obvious ground of separation) so direct or frequent, 
as that which was made of the classical and romantic literature. 
For, much about the same time, the rich and fascinating stores 
of the Greek and Roman mythology, and those of the romantic 
poetry of Spain and Italy, were eagerly explored by the curious, 
and thrown open in translations to the admiring gaze of the 
vulgar. This last circumstance could hardly have afforded so 
much advantage to the poets of that day, who were themselves, 
in fact, the translators, as it shows the general curiosity and in- 
creasing interest in such subjects, as a prevailing feature of the 
times. There were translations of Tasso by Fairfax, and of 
Ariosto by Harrington, of Homer and Hesiod by Chapman, and 
of Virgil long before, and Ovid soon after ; there was Sir 
Thomas North's translation of Plutarch, of which Shakspeare has 
made such admirable use in his Coriolanus and Julius Csesar ; 
and Ben Jonson's tragedies of Catiline and Sejanus may them- 
selves be considered as almost literal translations into verse, of 
Tacitus, Sallust, and Cicero's Orations in his consulship. Boc- 
cacio, the divine Boccacio, Petrarch, Dante, the satirist x^retine, 
Machiavel, Castiglione, and others, were familiar to our writers, 
and they make occasional mention of some few French authors, 
as Ronsard and Du Bartas ; for the French literature had not at 
this stage arrived at its Augustan period, and it was the imitation 
of their literature a century afterwards, when it had arrived at 
its greatest height (itself copied from the Greek and Latin,) that 
enfeebled and impoverished our own. But of the time that we 
are considering, it might be said, without much extravagance, 
that every breath that blew, every wave that rolled to our shores, 
brought with it some accession to our knowledge, which was en- 
grafted on the national genius. In fact, all the disposable ma- 
terials that had been accumulating for a long period of time, 
either in our own or in foreign countries, were now brought 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 15 

together, and required nothing more than to be wrought up, pol- 
ished, or arranged in striking forms, for ornament and use. To 
this every inducement prompted ; the novelty of the acquisition 
of knowledge in many cases, the emulation of foreign wits, and 
of immortal works, the want and the expectation of such works 
among ourselves, the opportunity and encouragement afforded 
for their production by leisure and affluence ; and, above all, the 
insatiable desire of the mind to beget its own image, and to con- 
struct out of itself, and for the delight and admiration of the 
world and posterity, that excellence of which the idea exists 
hitherto only in its own breast, and the impression of which it 
would make as universal as the eye of heaven, the benefit as 
common as the air we breathe. The first impulse of genius is 
to create what never existed before : the contemplation of that 
which is so created, is sufficient to satisfy the demands of taste ; 
and it is the habitual study and imitation of the original models 
that takes away the power, and even wish to do the like. Taste 
limps after genius, and from copying the artificial models, we 
lose sight of the living principle of nature. It is the effort we 
make, and the impulse we acquire, in overcoming the first ob- 
stacles, that projects us forward ; it is the necessity for exertion that 
makes us conscious of our strength ; but this necessity and this 
impulse once removed, the tide of fancy and enthusiasm, which 
is at first a running stream, soon settles and crusts into the 
standing pool of dulness, criticism, and virtu. 

What also gave an unusual impetus to the mind of man at this 
period, was the discovery of the New World, and the reading of 
voyages and travels. Green islands and golden sands seemed to 
arise, as by enchantment, out of the bosom of the watery waste, 
and invite the cupidity, or wing the imagination of the dreaming 
speculator. Fairy land was realized in new and unknown 
worlds. " Fortunate fields and groves and flowery vales, thrice 
happy isles," were found floating " like those Hesperian gardens 
famed of old," beyond Atlantic seas, as dropt from the zenith. 
The people, the soil, the clime, every thing gave unlimited scope 
to the curiosity of the traveller and reader. Other manners 
might be said to enlarge the bounds of knowledge, and new 
mines of wealth were tumbled at our feet. It is from a voyage 



16 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



to the Straits of Magellan that Shakspeare has taken the hint of 
Prospero's Enchanted Island, and of the savage Caliban with his 
god Setebos.* Spenser seems to have had the same feeling in 
his mind in the production of his Faery Queen, and vindicates 
his poetic fiction on this very ground of analogy. 

•' Right well I wote, most mighty sovereign, 

That all this famous antique history 

Of some the abundance of an idle brain 

Will judged be, and painted forgery, 

Rather than matter of just memory : 

Since none that breatheth living air, doth know 

Where is th^t happy land of faery 

Which I so much do vaunt, but nowhere show, 

But vouch antiquities which nobody can know. 

But let that man with better sense avise. 
That of the world least part to us is read : 
And daily how through hardy enterprize 
Many great regions are discovered. 
Which to late age were never mentioned. 
Who ever heard of the Indian Peru '? 
Or who in venturous vessel measured 
The Amazon's huge river, now found true? 
Or fruitfuUest Virginia who did ever view 1 

Yet all these where when no man did them know, 
Yet have from wisest ages hidden been : 
And later times tilings more unknown shall show. 
Why then should witless man so much misween 
That nothing is but that which he hath seen 1 
What, if within the moon's fair shining sphere, 
What, if in every other star unseen, 
Of other worlds he happily should hear 1 
He wonder would much more ; yet such to some appear.'* 

Fancy's air-drawn pictures after history's waking dream 
showed like clouds over mountains ; and from the romance of 
real life to the idlest fiction, the transition seemed easy. Shak- 
speare, as well as others of his time, availed himself of the old 
Chronicles, and of the traditions or fabulous inventions contained 
in them in such ample measure, and which had not yet been ap- 
propriated to the purposes of poetry or the drama. The stage 

* See a Voyage to the Straits of Magellan, 1594. 



GENERAL VIEW OP THE SUBJECT. 17 

* 

was a new thing ; and those who had to supply its demands laid 
their hands upon whatever came within their reach : they were 
not particular as to the means, so that they gained the end. 
Lear is founded upon an old ballad ; Othello on an Italian novel ; 
Hamlet on a Danish, and Macbeth on a Scotch tradition : one of 
which is to be found in Saxo-Grammaticus, and the last in Hoi- 
lingshed. The Ghost-scenes and the Witches in each, are au- 
thenticated in the old Gothic history. There was also this con- 
necting link between the poetry of this age and the supernatural 
traditions of a former one, that the belief in them was still extant, 
and in full force and visible operation among the vulgar (to say 
no more, in the time of our authors. The appalling and wild 
chimeras of superstition and ignorance, " those bodiless creations 
that ecstacy is very cunning in," were inwoven with existing man- 
ners and opinions, and all their effects on the passions of terror 
or pity might be gathered from common and actual observation — 
might be discerned in the workings of the face, the expressions 
of the tongue, the writhings of a troubled conscience. " Your 
face, my Thane, is as a book where men may read strange mat- 
ters." Midnight and secret murders, too, from the imperfect 
state of the police, were more common ; and the ferocious and 
brutal manners that would stamp the brow of the hardened ruf- 
fian or hired assassin, more incorrigible and undisguised. The 
portraits of Tyrrel and Forrest were, no doubt, done from the 
life. We find that the ravages of the plague, the destructive 
rage of fire, the poisoned chalice, lean famine, the serpent's mor- 
tal sting, and the fury of wild beasts, were the common topics of 
their poetry, as they were common occurrences in more remote 
periods of history. They were the strong ingredients thrown 
into the cauldron of tragedy to make it " thick and slab." Man's 
life was (as it appears to me) more full of traps and pit-falls ; 
of hair-breadth accidents by flood and field ; more way-laid by 
sudden and startling evils ; it trod on the brink of hope and fear ; 
stumbled upon fate unawares ; while the imagination, close be- 
hind it, caught at and clung to the shape of danger, or " snatched 
a wild and fearful joy" from its escape. The accidents of na- 
ture were less provided against ; the excesses of the passions and 
of lawless power were less regulated, and produced more strange 



18 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



and desperate catastrophes. The tales of Boccacio are founded 
on the great pestilence of Florence; Fletcher the poet died of 
the plague, and I\Iarlowe was stabbed in a tavern quarrel. The 
strict authority of parents, the inequality of ranks, or the heredi- 
tary feuds between different families, made more unhappy loves 
or matches. 

' The course of true love never did run smooth." 

Again, the heroic and martial spirit which breathes in our 
elder writers, was yet in considerarble activity in the reign of 
Elizabeth. " The age of chivalry was not then quite gone, nor 
the glory of Europe extinguished for ever." Jousts and tourna- 
ments were still common with the nobility in England and in 
foreign countries. Sir Philip Sidney was particularly distin- 
guished for his proficiency in these exercises (and indeed fell a 
martyr to his ambition as a soldier) — and the gentle Surrey was 
still more famous, on the same account, just before him. It is 
true, the general use of fire-arms gradually superseded the ne- 
cessity of skill in the sword, or bravery in the person : and we 
find many symptoms of the rapid degeneracy in this respect. It 
was comparatively an age of peace, 

'' Like strength reposing on his own right arm ;" 

but the sound of civil combat might still be heard in the distance, 
the spear glittered to the eye of memory, or the clashing of ar- 
mour struck on the imagination of the ardent and the young. 
They were borderers on the savage state, on the times of war 
and bigotry, though in the lap of arts, of luxury, and knowledge. 
They stood on the shore and saw the billows rolling after the 
storm : " they heard the tumult, and were still." The manners 
and out-of-door amusements were more tinctured with a spirit of 
adventure and romance. The war with wild beasts, &c., was 
more strenuously kept up in country sports. I do not think we 
could get from sedentary poets, who had never mingled in the 
vicissitudes, the dangers, or excitements of the chase, such de- 
scriptions of hunting and other athletic games, as are to be found 
in Shakspeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, or Fletcher's Noble 
Kinsmen. 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 19 

With respect to the good cheer and hospitable living of those 
times, I cannot agree with an ingenious and agreeable writer of 
the present day, that it was general or frequent. The very stress 
laid upon certain holidays and festivals, shows that they did not 
keep up the same Saturnalian license and open-house all the 
year round. They reserved themselves for great occasions, and 
made the best amends they could for a year of abstinence and 
toil by a week of merriment and convivial indulgence. Persons 
in middle life at this day, who can afford a good dinner every 
day, do not look forward to it as any particular subject of exul- 
tation : the poor peasant, who can only contrive to treat himself 
to a joint of meat on a Sunday, considers it as an event in the 
week. So, in the old Cambridge comedy of the Returne from 
Parnassus, we find this indignant description of the progress of 
luxury in those days, put into the mouth of one of the speakers : 

" Why is't not strange to see a ragged clerke, 
Some stanimell weaver, or some butcher s sonne, 
That scrubb'd a late within a sleeveless gowne, 
When the commencement, like a morrice dance, 
Hath put a bell or two about his legges, 
Created him a sweet cleane gentleman: 
How then he 'gins to follow fashions. 
He whose thin sire dwelt in a smokye roofe, 
Must take tobacco, and must wear a locke. 
His thirsty dad di'inks in a wooden bowle, 
But his sweet self is served in silver plate. 
His hungry sire will scrape you twenty legges 
For one good Christmas meal on new-year's day, 
But his mawe must be capon cramm'd each day." 

Ad III, Scenes. 

This does not look as if in those days " it snowed of meat and 
drink," as a matter of course throughout the year ! The dis- 
tinctions of dress, the badges of different professions, the very 
signs of the shops, which we have set aside for written inscrip- 
tions over the doors, were, as Mr. Lamb observes, a sort of 
visible language to the imagination, and hints for thought. Like 
the costume of different foreign nations, they had an immediate 
striking and picturesque effect, giving scope to the fancy. The 
surface of society was embossed with hieroglyphics, and poetry 



20 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



existed " in act and complement extern." The poetry of former 
times might be directly taken from real life, as our poetry is 
taken from the poetry of former times. Finally, the face of na- 
ture, which was the same glorious object then that it is now, was 
open to them ; and coming first, they gathered her fairest flowers 
to live for ever in their verse — the movements of the human 
heart were not hid from them, for they had the same passions as 
we, only less disguised, and less subject to control. Decker has 
given an admirable description of a mad-house in one of his 
plays. But it might be perhaps objected, that it was only a lite- 
ral account taken from Bedlam at that time : and it might be an- 
swered, that the old poets took the same methods of describing 
the passions and fancies of men whom they met at large, which 
forms the point of communion between us ; for the title of the old 
play, ' A Mad World, my Masters,' is hardly yet obsolete ; and 
we are pretty much the same Bedlam still, perhaps a little better 
managed, like the real one, and with more care and humanity 
shown to the patients ! 

Lastly, to conclude this account ; what gave a unity and com- 
mon direction to all these causes, was the natural genius of the 
country, which was strong in these writers in proportion to their 
strength. We are a nation of islanders, and we cannot help it ; 
nor mend ourselves if we would. We are something in our- 
selves, nothing when we try to ape others. Music and painting 
are not our forte : for what we have done in that way has been 
little, and that borrowed from others with great difficulty. But 
we may boast of our poets and philosophers. That's something. 
We have had strong heads and sound hearts among us. Thrown 
on one side of the world, and left to bustle for ourselves, we have 
fought out many a battle for truth and freedom. That is our 
natural style ; and it were to be wished we had in no instance 
departed from it. Our situation has given us a certain cast of 
thought and character ; and our liberty has enabled us to make 
the most of it. We are of a stiff clay, not moulded into every 
fashion, with stubborn joints not easily bent. We are slow to 
think, and therefore impressions do not work upon us till they 
act in masses. We are not forward to express our feelings, and 
therefore they do not come from us till they force their way in 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 21 

the most impetuous eloquence. Our language is, as it were, to 
begin anew, and we make use of the most singular and boldest 
combinations to explain ourselves. Our wit comes from us, 
"like birdlime, brains and all." We pay too little attention 
to form and method, leave our works in an unfinished state, but 
still the materials we work in are solid and of nature's mint ; we 
do not deal in counterfeits. We both under and over-do, but we 
keep an eye to the prominent features, the main chance. We are 
more for weight than show ; care only about what interests our- 
selves, instead of trying to impose upon others by plausible ap- 
pearances, and are obstinate and intractable in not conforming 
to common rules, by which many arrive at their ends with half 
the real waste of thought and trouble. We neglect all but the 
principal object, gather our force to make a great blow, bring it 
down, and relapse into sluggishness and indifference again. 
Materiam superabat opus, cannot be said of us. We may be ac- 
cused of grossness, but not of flimsiness ; of extravagance, but 
not of affectation ; of want of art and refinement, but not of a 
want of truth and nature. Our literature, in a word, is Gothic 
and grotesque ; unequal and irregular ; not cast in a previous 
mould, nor of one uniform texture, but of great weight in the 
whole, and of incomparable value in the best parts. It aims at 
an excess of beauty or power, hits or misses, and is either very 
good indeed, or absolutely good for nothing. This character ap- 
plies in particular to our literature in the age of Elizabeth, which 
is its best period, before the introduction of a rage for French 
rules and French models ; for whatever may be the value of our 
own original style of composition, there can be neither offence 
nor presumption in saying, that it is at least better than our se- 
cond-hand imitations of others. Our understanding (such as it 
is and must remain, to be good for anything) is not a thorough- 
fare for common places, smooth as the palm of one's hand, but 
full of knotty points and jutting excrescences, rough, uneven, 
overgrown with brambles ; and I like this aspect of the mind (as 
some one said of the country), where nature keeps a good deal 
of the soil in her own hands. Perhaps the genius of our poetry 
has more of Pan than of Apollo ; " but Pan is a God, Apollo is no 
more !" 



S3 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



LECTURE II. 

On the Dramatic Writers contemporary with Shakspeare, Lyly, Marlowe, 
Heywood, Middleton, and Rowley. 

The period of which I shall have to treat (from the Reformation 
to the middle of Charles I.) was prolific in dramatic excellence 
even more than in any other. In approaching it, we seem to be 
approaching the rich strond described in Spenser, where trea- 
sures of all kinds lay scattered, or rather crowded together on 
the shore in inexhaustible but unregarded profusion, " rich as 
the oozy bottom of the deep in sunken wrack and sumless trea- 
suries." We are confounded with the variety, and dazzled with 
the dusky splendour of names sacred in their obscurity, and 
works gorgeous in their decay, '• majestic, though in ruin," like 
Guyon when he entered the Cave of Mammon, and was shown 
the massy pillars and huge unwieldy fragments of gold, covered 
with dust and cobwebs, and shedding a faint shadow of uncertain 
light, 

" Such as a lamp whose light doth fade away 

Or as the moon clothed with cloudy night 

Doth show to him that walks in fear and sad affright." 

The dramatic literature of this period only wants exploring, to 
fill the inquiring mind with wonder and delight, and to convince 
us that we have been wrong ir\ lavishing all our praise on " new- 
born gauds, though they are made and moulded of things past ;" 
and in "giving to dust, that is a little gilt, more laud than gilt 
o'er-dusted." In short, the discovery of such an unsuspected 
and forgotten mine of wealth will be found amply to repay the 
labour of the search, and it will be hard if in most cases curi- 
osity does not end in admiration, and modesty teach us wisdom. 
A few of the most singular productions of these times remain un- 
claimed ; of others, the authors are uncertain ; many of them 



ON LYLY, MARLOWE, HEYWOOD, ETC. 23 

are joint productions of different pens ; but of the best the 
writers' names are in general known, and obviously stamped on 
the productions themselves. The names of Ben Jonson, for in- 
stance, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, are almost, though 
not quite, as familiar to us as that of Shakspeare ; and their 
works still keep regular possession of the stage. Another set of 
writers included in the same general period (the end of the six- 
teenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century,) who are 
next, or equal, or sometimes superior to these in power, but 
whose names are now little known, and their writings nearly ob- 
solete, are Lyly, Marlowe, Marston, Chapman, Middleton, and 
Rowley, Heywood, Webster, Decker, and Ford. I shall devote 
the present and two following Lectures to the best account I 
can give of these, and shall begin with some of the least 
known. 

The earliest tragedy of which I shall take notice (I believe 
the earliest that we have) is that of Ferrex and Porrex, or Gor- 
boduc (as it has been generally called,) the production of Thomas 
Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, afterwards created Earl of Dorset, 
assisted by one Thomas Norton. This was first acted with ap- 
plause before the Queen in 1561, the noble author being then 
quite a young man. This tragedy being considered as the first 
in our language, is certainly a curiosity, and in other respects it 
is also remarkable ; though, perhaps, enough has been said about 
it. As a work of genius, it may be set down as nothing, for it 
contains hardly a memorable line or passage ; as a work of art, 
and the first of its kind attempted in the language, it may be 
considered as a monument of the taste and skill of the authors. 
Its merit is confined to the regularity of the plot and metre, to its 
general good sense, and strict attention to common decorum. If 
the poet has not stamped the peculiar genius of his age upon this 
first attempt, it is no inconsiderable proof of strength of mind and 
conception sustained by its own sense of propriety alone, to have 
so far anticipated the taste of succeeding times as to have avoided 
any glaring offence against rules and models, which had no ex- 
istence in his day. Or perhaps a truer solution might be, that 
there were as yet no examples of a more ambiguous and irregu- 
lar kind to tempt him to err, and as he had not the impulse or 



24 . THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



resources within himself to strike out a new path, he merely ad- 
hered with modesty and caution to the classical models with 
which, as a scholar, he was well acquainted. The language of 
the dialogue is clear, unaffected, and intelligible without the 
smallest difficulty, even to this day ; it has " no figures nor no fan- 
tasies," to which the most fastidious critic can object, but the 
dramatic power is nearly none at all. It is written expressly to 
set forth the dangers and mischiefs that arise from the division of 
sovereign power ; and the several speakers dilate upon the dif- 
ferent views of the subject in turn, like clever school-boys set to 
compose a thesis, or declaim upon the fatal consequences of am- 
bition, and the uncertainty of human affairs. The author, in 
the end, declares for the doctrine of passive obedience and non- 
resistance ; a doctrine which indeed was seldom questioned at 
that time of day. Eubulus, one of the old king's counsellors, 
thus gives his opinion — 

" Eke fully with the duke my mind agrees, 
That no cause serves, whereby the subject may 
Call to account the doings of his prince ; 
Much less in blood by sword to work revenge : 
No more than may the hand cut off the head. 
In act nor speech, no nor in secret thought, 
The subject may rebel against his lord, 
Or judge of him that sits in Caesar's seat, 
With grudging mind to damn those he mislikes. 
Though kings forget to govern as they ought, 
Yet subjects must obey as they are bound." 

Yet how little he was borne out in this inference by the unbi- 
assed dictates of his own mind, may appear from the freedom 
and unguarded boldness of such lines as the following, addressed 
by a favourite to a prince, as courtly advice : 

" Know ye that lust of kingdoms hath no law : 
The gods do bear and will allow in kings 
The things that they abhor in rascal routs. 
When kings on slender quarrels run to wars, 
And then in cruel and unkindly wise 
Command thefts, rapes, murder of innocents, 
The spoil of towns, ruins of mighty realms ; 
Think you such princes do suppose themselves 



ON LYLY, MARLOWE, HEYWOOD, ETC. 25 

Subject to laws of kind and fear of gods 1 
Murders and violent thefts in private men 
Are heinous crimes, and full of foul reproach ; 
Yet none offence, but deck'd with noble name 
Of glorious conquests in the hands of kings." 

The principal characters make as many invocations to the 
names of their children, their country, and their friends, as 
Cicero in his Orations, and all the topics insisted upon are open, 
direct, urged in the face of day, with no more attention to time 
or place, to an enemy who overhears, or an accomplice to whom 
they are addressed ; in a word, with no more dramatic insinua- 
tions or bye-play than the pleadings in a court of law. Almost 
the only passage that I can instance, as rising above this didactic 
tone of mediocrity into the pathos of poetry, is one where Mar- 
cella laments the untimely death of her lover, Ferrex : 

" Ah ! noble prince, how oft have I beheld 
Thee mounted on thy fierce and trampling steed, 
Shining in armour bright before the tilt 
And with thy mistress' sleeve tied on thy helm, 
And charge thy staff to please thy lady's eye. 
That bowed the head-piece of thy friendly foe ! 
How oft in arms on horse to bend the mace, 
How oft in arms on foot to break the sword, 
Which never now these eyes may see again !" 

There seems a reference to Chaucer in the wording of the 
following lines — 

" Then saw I how he smiled with slaying" knife 
Wrapp'd under cloke, then saw 1 deep deceit 
Lurk in his face, and death prepa^'ed ^or me."* 

Sir Philip Sidney says of this tragedy : " Gorboduc is full of 
stately speeches, and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the 
height of Seneca his style, and as full of notable morality ; 
which it doth most delightfully teach, and thereby obtain the 
very end of poetry." And Mr. Pope, whose taste in such mat- 
ters was very different from Sir Philip Sidney's, says in still 

• « The smiler with the knife under his doke,'"— Knight's TcUe. 
3 



THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



stronger terms : " That the writers of the succeeding age might 
have improved as much in other respects, by copying from him 
a propriety in the sentiments, an unaffected perspicuity of style, 
and an easy flow in the numbers. In a word, that chastity, cor- 
rectness, and gravity of style, which are so essential to tragedy, 
and which all the tragic poets who followed, not excepting 
Shakspeare himself, either little understood, or perpetually neg- 
lected." It was well for us and them that they did so! 

The Induction to the Mirrour for Magistrates does his muse 
more credit. It sometimes reminds one of Chaucer, and at 
others seems like an anticipation, in some degree, both of the 
measure and manner of Spenser. The following stanzas may 
<rive the reader an idea of the merit of this old poem, which 
was published in 1563 : 

" By him lay heauie Sleepe cosin of Death 
Flat on the ground, and still as any stone, 
A very corps, saue yeelding foath a breath. 
Small keepe tooke he whom Fortune frowned on, 
Or whom she lifted vp into the throne 

Of high renowne, but as a lining death, 

So dead aliue, of life he drew the breath. 

The bodies rest, the quiet of the hart, 
The trauiles ease, the still nights feere was he. 
And of our life in earth the better part, 
Re\i«^,r of sight, and in whom we see 
Things oft that tide, and oft that neuer bee. • 

"Without respect esteeming equally 

King Croisus pompe, and Irus pouertie. 

And next n. order sad Old Age we found. 
His beard allv.oa.^, his eyes hollow and bUnd, 
With drouping cheere still poring on the ground, 
As on the place where nature him assign'd 
To rest, when that the sister's had vntwin'd 

His vitall thred, and ended with their knife 

The fleeting course of fast declining life. 

There heard we him with broke and hollow plaint 
Rew with himselfe his end approaching fast, 
And all for nought his wretched mind torment, 
With sweete remembrance of his pleasures past, 
And fresh delites of lustie youth forewast. 



ON LYLY, MARLOWE, HEYWOOD, ETC. 27 



Recounting which, how would he sob and shreek 7 
And to be young againe of loite besecke. 

But and the cruell fates so fixed be, 
That time forepast cannot returne againe, 
This one request of loue yet prayed he : 
That in such withred plight, and wretched paine, 
As Eld (accompanied with lothsome traine) 

Had brought on him, all were it woe and griefe, 

He might a while yet linger forth his life. 

And not so soone descend into the pit ; 

Where Death, when he the mortall corps hath slaine, 

With wretchlesse hand in graue doth couer it, 

Thereafter neuer to enjoy againe 

The gladsome light, but in the ground ylaine, 

In depth of darknesse waste and weare to nought, 
As he had nere into the world been brought. 

But who had seene him, sobbing how he stood 
Vnto himselfe, and how he would bemone 
His youth forepast, as though it wrought him good 
To talk of youth, all were his youth forgone, 
He would haue mused and maruail'd much whereon 
This wretched Age should life desire so faine. 
And knowes ful wel life doth but length his pAine. 

Crookebackt he was, toothshaken, and blere eyed, 
Went on three feete, and sometime crept on foure, 
With old lame bones, that railed by his side. 
His scalpe all pil'd and he with eld forelore : 
His withred fist still knocking at Death's dore, 
Fumbling and driueling as he draws his breath, 
For briefe, the shape and messenger of Death." ^ 

John Lyly (born in the Weald of Kent about the year 1553), 
was the author of Midas and Endymion, of Alexander and 
Campaspe, and of the comedy of Mother Bombie. Of the last 
it may be said, that it is very much what its name would import, 
old, quaint, and vulgar.— 1 may here observe, once for all, that 
I would not be understood to say, that the age of Elizabeth was 
all of gold without any alloy. There was both gold and lead in 
it, and often in one and the same writer. In our impatience to 
form an opinion, we conclude, when we first meet with a good 
thing, that it is owing to the age j or, if we meet with a bad one, 



THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



it is characteristic of the age, when, in fact, it is neither ; for 
there are good and bad in almost all ages, and one age excels 
in one thing, another in another— only one age may excel more 
and in higher things than another, but none can excel equally 
and completely in all. The writers of Elizabeth, as poets, 
soared to the height they did by indulging their own unrestrained 
enthusiasm ; as comic writers they chiefly copied the manners 
of the age, which did not give them the same advantages over 
their successors. Lyly's comedy, for instance, is " poor, un- 
fledged, has never winged from view o' th' nest," and tries in 
vain to rise above the ground with crude conceits and clumsy 
levity. Lydia, the heroine of the piece, is silly enough, if the 
rest were but as witty. But the author has shown no partiality 
in the distribution of his gifts. To say the truth, it was a very 
common fault of the old comedy, that its humours were too low, 
and the weaknesses exposed too great to be credible, or an object 
of ridicule, even if they were. The aflfectation of their cour- 
tiers is passable, and diverting as a contrast to present manners ; 
but the eccentricities of their clowns are " very tolerable, and 
not to be endured." Any kind of activity of mind might seem 
to the writers batter than none : any nonsense served to amuse 
their hearers ; any cant phrase, any coarse allusion, any pom- 
pons absurdity, was taken for wit and drollery. Nothing could 
be too mean, too foolish, too improbable, or too offensive, to be a 
proper subject for laughter. Any one (looking hastily at this 
side of the question only) might be tempted to suppose the 
youngest children of Thespis a very callow brood, chirping 
their slender notes, or silly swains " grating their lean and flashy 
jests on scrannel pipes of wretched straw." The genius of 
comedy looked too often like a lean and hectic pantaloon ; love 
was a slip-shod shepherdess ; wit a parti-coloured fool like bar- 
lequin, and the plot came hobbling like a clown after all. A 
string of impertinent and farcical jests ^'or rather blunders), was 
with great formality, ushered into the world as " a right pleasant 
and conceited comedy." Comedy could not descend lower than 
it sometimes did, without glancing at physical imperfections and 
deformity. The two young persons in the play before us, on 
whom the event of the plot chiefly hinges, do in ikct turn out to 



ON LYLY, MARLOWE, HEYWOOD, ETC. 



be no better than changelings and natural idiots. This is car- 
rying innocence and simplicity too far. So again, the character 
of Sir Tophas in Endymion, an affected, blustering, talkative, 
cowardly pretender, treads too near upon blank stupidity and 
downright want of common sense to be admissible as a butt for 
satire. Shakspeare has contrived to clothe the lamentable na- 
kedness of the same sort of character with a motley garb from 
the wardrobe of his imagination, and has redeemed it from in- 
sipidity by a certain plausibility of speech and playful extrava- 
gance of humour. But the undertaking was nearly desperate. 
Ben Jonson tried to overcome the difficulty by the force of learn- 
ing and study ; and thought to gain his end by persisting in 
error ; but he only made matters worse, for his clowns and cox- 
combs (if we except Bobadil) are the most incorrigible and in- 
sufferable of all others. — The story of Mother Bomdie is little 
else than a tissue of absurd mistakes, arising from the confusion 
of the different characters one with another, like another Comedy 
of Errors, and ends in their being (most of them) married in a 
game at cross-purposes to the persons they particularly dislike. 

To leave this, and proceed to something pleasanter, Midas and 
Endymion, which are worthy of their names and of the subject. 
The story in both is classical, and the execution is for the most 
part elegant and simple. There is often something that reminds 
one of the graceful communicativeness of Lucian or of Apuleius, 
from whom one of the stories is borrowed. Lyly made a more 
attractive picture of Grecian manners at second-hand, than of 
English characters from his own observation. The poet (which 
is the great merit of a poet in such a subject) has transported 
himself to the scene of action, to ancient Greece or Asia Minor ; 
the manners, the images, the traditions are preserved with truth 
and delicacy, and the dialogue (to my fancy) glides and sparkles 
like a clear stream from the Muses' spring. I know few things 
more perfect in characteristic painting, than the exclamation of 
the Phrygian shepherds, who, afraid of betraying the secret of 
Midas's ears, fancy that " the very reeds bow down, as though 
they listened to their talk ;" nor more affecting in sentiment than 
the apostrophe addressed by his friend Eumenides to Endymion, 
on waking from his long sleep : " Behold, the twig to which thou 



30 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



laidest down thy head is now become a tree," The narrative 
is sometimes a little wandering and desultory ; but if it had been 
ten times as tedious, this thought would have redeemed it ; for I 
cannot conceive of anything more beautiful, more simple, or 
touching, than this exquisitely chosen image and dumb proof of 
the manner in which he passed his life, from youth to old age, in 
a dream, a dream of love. Happy Endymion ! Faithful Eume- 
nides ! Divine Cynthia ! Who would not wish to pass his life in 
such a sleep, a long, long sleep, dreaming of some fair heavenly 
Goddess, with the moon shining upon his face and the trees 
growing silently over his head ! — There is something in this 
story which has taken a strange hold of my fancy, perhaps '•' out 
of my weakness and my melancholy ;" but for the satisfaction 
of the reader I will quote the whole passage : — " It is silly sooth, 
and dallies with the innocence of love like the old age.'' 

^^ Cynthia. Well, let us to Endymion. I will not be so stately (good 
Endymion) not to stoop to do thee good ; and if thy liberty consist in a kiss 
from me, thou shalt have it. And although my mouth hath been heretofore 
as untouched as my thoughts, yet now to recover thy life (though to restore 
thy youth it be impossible) I will do that to Endymion which yet never 
mortal man could boast of heretofore, nor shall ever hope for hereafter. {^She 
kisses him.) 

Eumenides. Madam, he beginneth to stir. 

Cynthia. Soft, Eumenides, stand still. 

Eumenides. Ah ! I see his eyes almost open, 

Cynthia. I command thee once again, stir not : I will stand behind him. 

Panelion. What do I see 1 Endymion almost awake 1 

Eumenides. Endymion, Endymion, art thou deaf or dumb 1 Or hath this 
long sleep taken away thy memory 1 Ah ! my sweet Endymion, seest thou 
not Eumenides, thy faithful friend; thy faithful Eumenides, who for thy sake 
hath been careless of his own content! Speak, Endymion! Endymion! 
Endymion ! 

Endymion. Endymion ! I call to mind such a name. 

Eumenides. Hast thou forgotten thyself, Endymion? Then do I not 
marvel thou rememberest not thy friend. I tell thee thou art Endymion, and 
I Eumenides. Behold also, Cynthia, by whose favour thou art awaked, and 
by whose virtue thou shalt continue thy natural course. 

Cynthia. Endymion ! Speak, sweet Endymion ! knowest thou not Cyn- 
thia! 

Endymion. Oh heavens! whom do I behold? Fair Cynthia, divine 
Cynthia 1 

Cynthia. I am Cynthia, and thou Endymion. 



ON LYLY, MARLOWE, HEYWOOD, ETC. 31 

ETidyimon. Endymion ! What do I hear '? What ! a grey-beard, hollow 
eyes, withered body, decayed limbs, and all in one night 1 

Emaenides. One night! Thou hast slept here forty years, by what en- 
chantress, as yet it is not known : and behold the twig to which thou laidest 
thy head, is now become a tree. Callest thou not Eumenides to remembrance 1 

Endymion. Thy name I do remember by the sound, but thy favour I do 
not yet call to mind : only divine Cynthia, to whom time, fortune, death, and 
destiny are subject, I see and remember; and in all humility, I regard and re- 
verence. 

Cynthia. You shall have good cause to remember Eumenides, who hath 
for thy safety forsaken his own solace. 

Endymion. Am I that Endymion, who was wont in court to lead my life, 
and in jousts, tourneys, and arms, to exercise my youth 1 Ami that Endymion 1 

EnTnenides. Thou art that Endymion, and 1 Eumenides: wilt thou not 
yet call me to remembrance 1 

Endymion. Ah ! sweet Eumenides, I now perceive thou art he, and that 
myself have the name of Endymion ; but that this should be my body, I 
doubt : for how could my curled locks be turned to grey hair, and my strong 
body to a dying weakness, having waxed old, and not knowing it. 

Cynthia. Well, Endymion, arise: awhile sit down, for that thy limbs are 
stiff and not able to stay thee, and tell what thou hast seen in thy sleep all this 
while. What dreams, visions, thoughts, and fortunes : for it is impossible 
but in so long a lime thou shouldst see strange things." 

Act V. Scene 1. 

It does not take away from the pathos of this poetical allegory 
on the chances of love and the progress of human life, that it 
may be supposed to glance indirectly at the conduct of Queen 
Elizabeth to our author, who, after fourteen years' expectation 
of the place of Master of the Revels, was at last disappointed. 
This princess took no small delight in keeping her poets in a sort 
of Fool's Paradise. The wit of Lyly, in parts of this romantic 
drama, seems to have grown spirited and classical with his sub- 
ject. He puts this fine hyperbolical irony in praise of Dipsas, 
(a most unamiable personage, as it will appear,) into the mouth 
of Sir Tophas : 

" Oh, what fine thin hair hath Dipsas ! What a pretty low forehead ! 
What a tall ancj stately nose ! What little hollow eyes ! What great and 
goodly lips ! How harmless is she, being toothless I Her fingers fat and 
short, adorned with long nails like a bittern ! What a low stature she is, and 
yet what a great foot she carrieth ! How thrifty must she be, in whom there 
is no waist; how virtuous she is like to be over whom no man can be 
jealous !" Act III. Scene 3. 



32 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



It is singular that the style of this author, which is extremely 
sweet and flowing, should have been the butt of ridicule to his 
contemporaries, particularly Drayton, who compliments Sydney 
as the author that 

" Did first reduce 
Our tongue from Lyly's writing, then in use; 
Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies, 
Playing with words and idle similes, 
As the EngUsh apes and very zanies be 
Of every thing that they do hear and see." 

Which must apply to the prose style of his work, called " Euphues 
and his England," and is much more like Sir Philip Sydney's 
own manner, than the dramatic style of our poet. Besides the 
passages above quoted, I might refer to the opening speeches of 
Midas, and ao-ain to the admirable contention between Pan and 
Apollo for the palm of music. — His Alexander and Campaspe is 
another sufficient answer to the charge. This play is a very 
pleasing transcript of old manners and sentiment. It is full of 
sweetness and point, of Attic salt and the honey of Hymettus. 
The following song given to Apelles, would not disgrace the 
mouth of the prince of painters : 

" Cupid and my Campaspe play'd 

At cards for kisses, Cupid paid ; 

He stakes his quiver, bow, and arrows : 

His mother's doves and team of sparrows ; 

Loses them too, then down he throws 

The coral of his lip, the rose 

Growing on 's cheek (but none knows how) 

With these the crystal of his brow 

And then the dimple of his chin ; 

All these did my Campaspe win. 

At last he set her both his eyes. 

She won, and Cupid blind did rise. 

O, Love ! has she done this to thee ? 

What shall, alas ! become of me T' 

The conclusion of this drama is as follows. Alexander ad- 
dressing himself to Apelles, says, 

" Well, enjoy one another : I give her thee frankly, Apelles. Thou shalt 



ON LYLY, MARLOWE, HEYWOOD, ETC. 33 

see that Alexander maketli but a toy of love, and leadeth affection in fetters : 
using fancy as a fool to make him sport, or a minstrel to make him merry. It 
is not the amorous glance of an eye can settle an idle thought in the heart : no, 
no, it is children's game, a life for sempsters and scholars ; the one, pricking 
in clouts, have nothing else to think on ; the other picking fancies out of books, 
have little else to marvel at. Go, Apelles, take with you your Campaspe ; 
Alexander is cloyed with looking on at that, which thou wonderest at. 

Apelles. Thanks to your majesty on bended knee; you have honoured 
Apelles. 

Cavipaspe. Thanks with bowed heart; you have blessed Campaspe. 

[Exeunt. 

Alexander. Page, go warn Clytus and Parmenio, and the other lords, to be 
in readiness; let the trumpet sound, strike up the drum, and I will presently into 
Persia. How now, Hephistion, is Alexander able to resist love as he list 1 

Hephistlon. The conquering of Thebes was not so honourable as the sub- 
duing of these thoughts. 

Alexander. It were a shame Alexander should desire to command the 
world, if he could not command himself But come, let us go. And, good 
Hephistion, when all the world is won, and eveiy countiy is thine and mine, 
either find me out another to subdue, or on my word, I will fall in love." 

Marlowe is a name that stands high, and almost first in this 
list of dramatic worthies. He was a little before Shakspeare's 
time,* and has a marked character both from him and the rest. 
There is a lust of power in his writings, a hunger and thirst 
after unrighteousness, a glow of the imagination, unhallowed by 
any thing but its own energies. His thoughts burn within him 
like a furnace with bickering flames : or throwing out black 
smoke and mists, that hide the dawn of genius, or like a poison- 
ous mineral, corrode the heart. His " Life and Death of Doctor 
Faustus," though an imperfect and unequal performance, is his 
greatest work. Faustus himself is a rude sketch, but it is a 
gigantic one. This character may be considered as a personifi- 
cation of the pride of will and eagerness of curiosity, sublimed 
beyond the reach of fear and remorse. He is hurried away, 
and, as it were, devoured by a tormenting desire to enlarge his 
knowledge to the utmost bounds of nature and art, and to extend 
his power with his knowledge. He would realize all the fictions 
of a lawless imagination, would solve the most subtle speculations 
of abstract reason ; and for this purpose sets at defiance all mortal 

* He died about 1594. 



34 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

consequences, and leagues himself with demoniacal power, with 
" fate and metaphysical aid." The idea of witchcraft and necro- 
mancy, once the dread of the vulgar and the darling of the vision- 
ary recluse, seems to have had its origin in the restless tendency 
of the human mind, to conceive of and aspire to more than it can 
achieve by natural means, and in the obscure apprehension that 
the gratification of this extravagant and unauthorized desire can 
only be attained by the sacrifice of all our ordinary hopes and 
better prospects, to the infernal agents that lend themselves to 
its accomplishment. Such is the foundation of the present story. 
Faustus, in his impatience to fulfil at once and for a moment, for 
a few short years, all the desires and conceptions of his soul, is 
willing to give in exchange his soul and body to the great enemy 
of mankind. Whatever he fancies, becomes by this means pre- 
sent to his sense : whatever he commands, is done. He calls 
back time past, and anticipates the future : the visions of antiquity 
pass before him, Babylon in all its glory, Paris and QEnone : all 
the projects of philosophers, or creations of the poet, pay tribute 
at his feet : all the delights of fortune, of ambition, of pleasure, 
and of learning are centred in his person ; and from a short-lived 
dream of supreme felicity and drunken power, he sinks into an 
abyss of darkness and perdition. This is the alternative to which 
he submits ; the bond which he signs with his blood ! As the 
outline of the character is grand and daring, the execution is 
abrupt and fearful. The thoughts are vast and irregular ; and 
the style halts and staggers under them, "with uneasy steps;" — 
"such footing found the sole of unblest feet." There is a little 
fustian and incongruity of metaphor now and then, which is not 
very injurious to the subject. It is time to give a few passages 
in illustration of this account. He thus opens his mind at the 
beginning : 

" How am I glutted with conceit of this ! 

Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please 1 

Resolve me of all ambiguities 1 

Perform what desperate enterprize I will 1 

I'll have, them fly to India for gold, 

Ransack the ocean for orient pearl, 

And search all corners of the new-found world 

For pleasant fruits and princely delicates. 



ON LYLY, MARLOWE, HEYWOOD, ETC. 35 

I'll have them read me strange philosophy, 
And tell the secrets of all foreign kings : 
I'll have them wall all Germany with brass, 
And make swift Rhine circle fair Wittenberg; 
I'll have them fill the public schools with skill, 
Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad ; 
I'll levy soldiers with the coin they bring, 
And chase the Prince of Parma from our land, 
And reign sole king of all the provinces: 
Yea, stranger engines for the brunt of war 
Than was the fiery keel at Antwerp bridge, 
I'll make my servile spirit to invent. 

Enter Valdes and Cornelius. 
Come, German Valdes and Cornelius, 
And make me blest with your sage conference. 
Valdes, sweet Valdes, and Cornelius, 
Know that your words have won me at the last 
To practise magic and concealed arts. 
Philosophy is odious and obscure ; 
Both Law and Physic are for petty wits ; 
'Tis magic, magic, that hath ravish'd me. 
Then, gentle friends, aid me in this attempt ; 
And I, that have with subtle syllogisms 
Gravell'd the pastors of the German church, 
And made the flow'ring pride of Wittenberg 
Swarm to my problems, as th' infernal spirits 
On sweet Musceus when he came to hell ; 
Will be as cunning as Agrippa was. 
Whose shadow made all Europe honour him. 

Valdes. These books, thy wit, and our experience 
Shall make all nations to canonize us. 
As Indian Moors obey their Spanish lords, 
So shall the spirits of every element 
Be always serviceable to us three. 
Like Lions shall they guard us when we please ; 
Like Almain Rutlers with their horseman's staves, 
Or Lapland giants trotting by our sides : 
Sometimes like women, or unwedded maids, 
Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows 
Than have the white breasts of the GLueen of Love. 
From Venice they shall drag whole argosies. 
And from America the golden fleece, 
That yearly stuffs old Philip's treasury* ; 
If learned Faustus will be resolute. 

* An anachronism. 



36 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

Faustus. As resolute am I in this 
As thou to live, therefore object it not." 

In his colloquy with the fallen angel, he shows the fixedness 
of his determination : — 

" What ! is great Mephostophilis so passionate 
For being deprived of the joys of heaven 1 
Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude, 
And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess." 

Yet we afterwards find him faltering in his resolution, and 
.struggling with the extremity of his fate : 

" My heart is harden'd, I cannot repent : 
Scarce can I name salvation, faith, or heaven ; 
Swords, poisons, halters, and envenom'd steel 
Are laid before me to dispatch myself; 
And long ere this I should have done the deed, 
Had not sweet pleasure conquer'd deep despair. 
Have I not made blind Homer sing to me 
Of Alexander's love and CEnon's death '? 
And hath not he that built the walls of Thebes 
With ravishing sounds of his melodious harp, 
Made music with my Mephostophilis ? 
Why should I die then or basely despair? 
I am resolv'd, Faustus shall not repent. 
Come, Mephostophilis, let us dispute again, 
And reason of divine astrology." 

There is one passage more of this kind, which is so striking 
and beautiful, so like a rapturous and deeply passionate dream, 
that I cannot help quoting it here : it is the address to the Appa- 
rition of Helen. 

Enter Helen again, passing over between two Cupids. 

Faustus. Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships, 
And burnt the topless tow'rs of Ilium'? 
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. 
Her lips suck forth my soul ! See where it flies. 
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again. 
Here will I dwell, for Heav'n is in these lips. 
And all is dross that is not Helena, 
I will be Paris, and for love of thee. 
Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sack'd ; 
And I will combat with weak Menelaus, 



ON LYLY, MARLOWE, HEYWOOD, ETC. 37 

And wear thy colours on my plumed crest ; 
Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel, 
And then return to Helen for a kiss. 
— Oh ! thou art fairer than the evening air, 
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars : 
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter, 
When he appeared to hapless Semele ; 
More lovely than the monarch of the sky 
In wanton Arethusa's azure arms ; 
And none but thou shalt be my paramour." 

The ending of the play is terrible, and his last exclamations 
betray an anguish of mind and vehemence of passion not to be 
contemplated without shuddering : 

— " Oh, Faustus ! 

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, 

And then thou must be damn'd perpetually. 

Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heav'n, 

That time may cease, and midnight never come. 

Fair nature's eye, rise, rise again, and make 

Perpetual day ; or let this hour be but a year, 

A month, a week, a natural day. 

That Faustus may repent, and save his soul. 

( The Clock strikes twelve.) 
It strikes ! it strikes ! Now, body, turn to air, 
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell. 
Oh soul ! be changed into small water-drops, 
And fall into the ocean ; ne'er to be found. 

( Thunder. Enter the Devils.) 

Oh ! mercy, Heav'n ! Look not so fierce on me ! 
Adders and serpents, let nie breathe awhile ! — 
Ugly hell, gape not ! Come not, Lucifer ! 
I'll bum my books ! Oh ! Mephostophilis." 

Perhaps the finest trait in the whole play, and that which 
softens and subdues the horror of it, is the interest taken by the 
two scholars in the fate of their master, and their unavailing at- 
tempts to dissuade him from his relentless career. The regard 
to learning is the ruling passion of this drama, and its indica- 
tions are as mild and amiable in them as its ungoverned pursuit 
has been fatal to Faustus. 

" Yet, for he was a scholar^once admir'd 



38 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

For wondrous knowledge in our German schools, 
We'll give his mangled hmbs due burial ; 
And all the students, clothed in mourning black, 
Shall wait upon his heavy funeral." 

So the Chorus : 

" Cut is the branch that might have grown full strait, 

And burned is Apollo's laurel bough, 

That sometime grew within this learned man." 

And still more affecting are his own conflicts of mind and 
agonizing doubts on this subject just before, when he exclaims 
to his friends : " Oh, gentlemen ! Hear me with patience, and 
tremble not at my speeches. Though my heart pant and quiver 
to remember that I have been a student here these thirty years ; 
oh ! would I had never seen Wittenberg, never read book V A 
finer compliment was never paid, nor a finer lesson ever read to 
the pride of learning. The intermediate comic parts, in which 
Faustus is not directly concerned, are mean and grovelling to 
the last degree. One of the Clowns says to another, " Snails ! 
what hast got there ? A book ? Why thou can'st not tell ne'er 
a word on't." Indeed, the ignorance and barbarism of the time, 
as here described, might almost justify Faustus's overstrained 
admiration of learning, and turn the heads of those who pos- 
sessed it from novelty and unaccustomed excitement, as the In- 
dians are made drunk with wine ! Goethe, the German poet, 
has written a drama on this tradition of his country, which is 
considered a master-piece. I cannot find in Marlowe's play, 
any proofs of the atheism or impiety attributed to him, unless the 
belief in witchcraft and the Devil can be regarded as such ; and 
at the time he wrote, not to have believed in both would have 
been construed into the rankest atheism and irreligion. There 
is a delight, as Mr. Lamb says, " in dallying with interdicted 
subjects;" but that does not, by any means, imply either a 
practical or speculative disbelief of them. 

'Lust's Dominion, or The Lascivious Queen,' is referable 
to the same general style of writing ; and is a striking picture, 
or rather caricature of the unrestrained love of power, not as 



ON LYLY, MARLOWE, HEYWOOD, ETC. 39 

connected with learning, but with regal ambition and external 
sway. There is a good deal of the same intense passion, the 
same recklessness of purpose, the same smouldering fire within : 
but there is not any of the same relief to the mind in the lofty 
imaginative nature of the subject, and the continual repetition 
of plain practical villainy and undigested horrors disgusts the 
sense and blunts the interest. The mind is hardened into obdu- 
racy, not melted into sympathy, by such barefaced and barbar- 
ous cruelty. Eleazar, the Moor, is such another character as 
Aaron in ' Titus Andronicus ;' and this play might be set down 
without injustice as " pew-fellow" to that. I should think Mar- 
lowe has a much fairer claim to be the author of ' Titus Andro- 
nicus' than Shakspeare, at least from internal evidence ; and the 
argument of Schlegel, that it must have been Shakspeare's, be- 
cause there was no one else capable of producing either its faults 
or beauties, fails in each particular. The Queen is the same 
character in both these plays, and the business of the plot is car- 
ried on in much the same revolting manner, by making the 
nearest friends and relatives of the wretched victims the instru- 
ments of their sufferings and persecution by an arch-villain. To 
show, however, that the same strong-braced tone of passionate 
declamation is kept up, take the speech of Eleazer'on refusing 
the proffered crown : 

" What, do none rise 7 
No, no, for kings indeed are deities. 
And who'd not (as the sun) in brightness shine 1 
To be the greatest is to be divine. 
Who among millions would not be the mightiest 1 
To sit in godlike state ; to have all eyes 
Dazzled with admiration, and all tongues 
Shouting loud prayers ; to rob every heart 
Of love ; to have the strength of every arm ; 
A sovereign's name, why 'tis a sovereign charm. 
This glory round about me hath thrown beams : 
I have stood upon the top of fortune's wheel. 
And backwards turned the iron screw of fate. 
The destinies have spun a silken thread 
About my life ; yet thus I cast aside 
The shape of Majesty, and on my knee 
To this Imperial state lowly resign 



40 THE AGE OP ELIZABETH. 



This usurpation ; wiping off your fears 
Which struck so hard upon me," 

This is enough to show the unabated vigour of the author's 
style. This strain is certainly doing justice to the pride of am- 
bition, and the imputed majesty of kings. 

We have heard much of " Marlowe's mighty line," and this 
play furnishes frequent instances of it. There are a number of 
single lines that seem struck out in the heat of a glowing fancy, 
and leave a track of golden fire behind them. The following 
are a few that might be given. 

" I know he is not dead; I know proud death 
Durst not behold such sacred majesty." 
***** 

" Hang both your greedy ears upon my lips, 
Let them devour my speech, suck in my breath." 
***** 

" From discontent grows treason, 

And on the stalk of treason death." 

* * * * * 

" Tyrants swim safest in a crimson flood."^ 

♦ * * * • 

The two following lines — 

" Oh ! I grow dull, and the cold hand of sleep ^ % 

Hath thrust his icy fingers in my breast" — 

are the same as those in King John — 

" And none of you will bid the winter come 
To thrust his icy fingers in my maw." 

And again the Moor's exclamation : 

" Now by the proud complexion of my cheeks, 
Ta'en from the kisses of the amorous sun" — 

is the same as Cleopatra's — 

« But I that am with Phoebus' amorous pinches black," &c. 

Eleazer's sarcasm, 



1 



ON LYLY, MARLOWE, HEYWOOD, ETC. 41 

" These dignities, 

Like poison, make men swell ; this rat's-bane honour, 
Oh, 'tis so sweet ! they'll lick it till they burst" — 

shows the utmost virulence of smothered spleen ; and his con- 
eluding strain of malignant exultation has been but tamely imi- 
tated by Young's Zanga : 

" Now, tragedy, thou minion of the night, 
Rhamnusia's pew-tellow,* to thee I'll sing, 
Upon a harp made of dead Spanish bones, 
The proudest instrument the world affords : 
To thee that never blushest, though thy cheeks 
Are full of blood, O Saint Revenge, to thee 
I consecrate my murders, all my stabs," &c. 

It may be worth while to observe, for the sake of the cu^rious, 
that many of Marlowe's most sounding lines consist of monosylla- 
bles, or nearly so. The repetition of Eleazer's taunt to the Car- 
dinal, retorting his own words upon him, " Spaniard or Moor, 
the saucy slave shall die" — may perhaps have suggested Fal- 
conbridge's spirited reiteration of the phrase, " And hang a 
calf's skin on those recreant limbs." 

I do not think ' The Rich Jew of Malta' so characteristic a 
specimen of this writer's powers. It has not the same fierce 
glow of passion or expression. It is extreme in act, and outrage- 
ous in plot and catastrophe ; but it has not the same vigorous 
filling up. The author seems to have relied on the horror in- 
spired by the subject, and the national disgust excited against 
the principal character, to rouse the feelings of the audience : for 
the rest, it is a tissue of gratuitous, unprovoked, and incredible 
atrocities, which are committed, one upon the back of the other, 
by the parties concerned, without motive, passion or object. 
There are, notwithstanding, some striking passages in it, as Ba- 
rabbas's description of the bravo, Philia Borzof ; the relation of 

* This expression seems to be ridiculed by FalstafF. 
t " He sent a shaggy, tattered, staring slave, 
That when he speaks draws out his grisly beard, 
And winds it twice or thrice about his ear; 
Whose face has been a grindstone for men's swords : 
4 



42 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



his own unaccountable villanies to Ithamore ; his rejoicing over 
his recovered jewels " as the morning lark sings over her young ;" 
and the backwardness he declares in himself to forgive the Chris- 
tian injuries that are offered him,* which may have given the 
idea of one -of Shylock's speeches, where he ironically disclaims 
any enmity to the merchants on the same account. It is per- 
haps hardly fair to compare the Jew of Malta with the Merchant 
of Venice ; for it is evident that Shakspeare's genius shows to as 
much advantage in knowledge of character, in variety, and stage- 
effect, as it does in point of general humanity. 

Edward II. is, according to the modern standard of composi- 

His hands are hack'd, some fingers cut quite off, 

Who when he speaks, grunts like a hog, and looks 

Like one that is employed in catzerie, 

And cross-biting; such a rogue 

As is the husband to a hundred whores ; 

And I by him must send three hundred crowns." 

Act IV. 

* " In spite of these swine-eating Christians 
(Unchosen nation, never circumcised ; 
Such poor villains as were ne'er thought upon, 
Till Titus and Vespasian conquer'd us) 
Am I become as wealthy as I am. 
They hoped my daughter would have been a nun ; 
But she's at home, and I have bought a house 
As great and fair as is the Governor's: 
And there, in spite of Malta, will I dwell. 
Having Ferneze's hand ; whose heart I'll have, 
Ay, and his son's too, or it shall go hard. 

" I am not of the tribe of Levi, I, 
That can so soon forget an injury. 
We Jews can fawn like spaniels when we please ; 
And when we grin we bite ; yet are our looks 
As innocent and harmless as a lamb's. 
I learn'd in Florence how to kiss my hand, 
Heave up my shoulders when they call me dog, 
And duck as low as any bare-foot Friar : 
Hoping to see them starve upon a stall, 
Or else be gather'd for in our synagogue, 
That when the offering bason comes to me, 
Even for charity I may spit into it." 



ON LYLY, MARLOWE, HEYWOOD, ETC. 43 

tion, Marlowe's best play. It is written with few offences against 
the common rules, and in a succession of smooth and flowing 
lines. The poet however succeeds less in the voluptuous and 
effeminate descriptions which he here attempts, than in the more 
dreadful and violent bursts of passion. Edward II. is drawn with 
historic truth, but without much dramatic effect. The manage- 
ment of the plot is feeble and desultory ; little interest is excited 
in the various turns of fate ; the characters are too worthless, 
have too little energy, and their punishment is, in general, too 
well deserved to excite our commiseration ; so that this play will 
bear, on the whole, but a distant comparison with Shakspeare's 
Richard II. in conduct, power, or effect. But the death of Ed- 
ward II., in Marlowe's tragedy, is certainly superior to that of 
Shakspeare's King ; and in heart-breaking distress, and the sense 
of human weakness, claiming pity from utter helplessness and 
conscious misery, is not surpassed by any writer whatever. 

" Edward. Weep'st thou already 1 List awhile to me, 
And then thy heart, were it as Gurney's is, 
Or as Matrevis, hew^n from the Caucasus, 
Yet will it melt ere I have done my tale. 
This dungeon where they keep me, is the sink 
Wherein the filth of all the castle falls. 

Lightborn. Oh villains. 

Edward. And here in mire and puddle have I stood 
This ten days' space ; and lest that I should sleep, 
One plays continually upon a drum. 
They give me bread and water, being a king; 
So that, for want of sleep and sustenance. 
My mind's distemper'd, and my body's numb'd: 
And whether I have limbs or no, I know not. 
Oh ! would my blood drop out from every vein, 
As doth this water from my tatter'd robes ! 
Tell Isabel, the Glueen, I look'd not thus, 
When for her sake I ran at tilt in France, 
And there unhors'd the Duke of Cleremont.'' 

There are some excellent passages scattered up and down. 
The description of the King and Gaveston looking out of the 
palace window, and laughing at the courtiers as they pass, and 
that of the different spirit shown by the lion and the forest deer, 



44 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

when wounded, are among the best. The song "Come live 
with me and be my love," to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote an 
answer, is Marlowe's. 

Heywood I shall mention next, as a direct contrast to Mar- 
lowe in everything but the smoothness of his verse. As Mar- 
lowe's imagination glows like a furnace, Heywood's is a gentle, 
lambent flame, that purifies without consuming. His manner is 
simplicity itself. There is nothing supernatural, nothing start- 
ling, or terrific. He makes use of the commonest circumstances 
of every-day life, and of the easiest tempers, to show the work- 
ings, or rather the inefRcacy of the passions, the vis inertice of 
tragedy. His incidents strike from their very familiarity, and 
the distresses he paints invite our sympathy from the calmness 
and resignation with which they are borne. The pathos might 
be deemed purer from its having no mixture of turbulence or 
vindictiveness in it ; and in proportion as the sufferers are made 
to deserve a better fate. In the midst of the most untoward re- 
verses and cutting injuries, good nature and good sense keep their 
accustomed sway. He describes men's errors with tenderness, 
and their duties only with zeal, and the heightenings of a poetic 
fancy. His style is equally natural, simple, and unconstrained. 
The dialogue (bating the verse) is such as might be uttered in 
ordinary conversation. It is beautiful prose put into heroic mea- 
sure. It is not so much that he uses the common English idiom 
for everything (for that 1 think the most poetical and impassioned 
of our elder dramatists do equally), but the simplicity of the cha- 
racters and the equable flow of the sentiments do not require or 
suffer it to be warped from the tone of level speaking, by figura- 
tive expressions, or hyperbolical allusions. A few scattered ex- 
ceptions occur now and then, where the hectic flush of passion 
forces them from the lips, and they are not the worse for being 
rare. Thus, in the play called ' A Woman Killed with Kind- 
ness,' Wendell, when reproached by Mrs. Frankford with his 
obligations to her husband, interrupts her hastily, by saymg 

" Oh speak no more ! 

For more than this I know, and have recorded 
Within the red-leaved table of my heart." 



ON LYLY, MARLOWE, HEYWOOD, ETC. 45 

And further on, Frankford, when doubting his wife's fidelity, says, 
with less feeling indeed, but with much elegance of fancy, 

" Cold drops of sweat sit dangling on my hairs, 
Like morning dew upon the golden flow'rs." 

So also, when returning to his house at midnight to make the 
fatal discovery, he exclaims, 

" Astonishment, 

Fear, and amazement, beat upon my heart, 
Even as a madman beats upon a drum." 

It is the reality of things present to their imaginations that 
makes these writers so fine, so bold, and yet so true in what they 
describe. Nature lies open to them like a book, and was not to 
them " invisible, or dimly seen" through a veil of words and 
filmy abstractions. Such poetical ornaments are however to be 
met with at considerable intervals in this play, and do not disturb 
the calm serenity and domestic simplicity of the author's style. 
The conclusion of Wendoll's declaration of love to Mrs. Frank- 
ford may serve as an illustration of its general merits, both as to 
purity of thought and diction : 

" Fair, and of all beloved, I was not fearful 

Bluntly to give my life into your hand. 

And at one hazard, all my earthly means. 

Go, tell your husband : he will turn me off, 

And I am then undone, I care not, I ; 

'Twas for your sake. Perchance in rage he'll kill me; 

I care not ; 'twas for you. Say I incur 

The general name of villain through the world, 

Of traitor to my friend : I care not, I ; 

Poverty, shame, death, scandal, and reproach, 

For you I'll hazard all : why what care 1 1 

For you I love, and for your love I'll die." 

The affecting remonstrance of Frankford to his wife, and her 
repentant agony at parting with him, are already before the pub- 
lic, in Mr. Lamb's Specimens. The winding up of this play is 
rather awkwardly managed, and the moral is, according to es- 
tablished usage, equivocal. It required only Frankford's recon- 
ciliation to his wife, as well as his forgiveness of her, for the 



46 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

highest breach of matrimonial duty, to have made a ' Woman 
Killed with Kindness/ a complete anticipation of the ' Stranger.' 
He^yvvood, however, was in that respect but half a Kotzebue ! — 
The view here given of country manners is truly edifying. As 
to the higher walk of tragedy, we see the manners and moral 
sentiments of kings and nobles of former times, here we have 
the feuds and amiable qualities of country ^squires and their re- 
latives ; and such as were the rulers, such were their subjects. 
The frequent quarrels and ferocious habits of private life are 
well exposed in the fatal rencounter between Sir Francis Acton 
and Sir Charles Mountford about a hawking match, in the ruin 
and rancorous persecution of the latter in consequence, and in 
the hard, unfeeling, cold-blooded treatment he receives in his 
distress from his own relations, and from a fellow of the name 
of Shafton. After reading the sketch of this last character, who 
is introduced as a mere ordinary personage, the representative 
of a class, without any preface or apology, no one can doubt the 
credibility of that of Sir Giles Overreach, who is professedly 
held up (I should think almost unjustly) as a prodigy of grasping 
and hardened selfishness. The influence of philosophy and pre- 
valence of abstract reasoning, if it has done nothing for our 
poetry, has done, I should hope, something for our manners. 
The callous declaration of one of these unconscionable churls, 

" This is no world in which to pity men," 

might have been taken as a motto for the good old times in gen- 
eral, and with a very few reservations, if Heywood has not 
grossly libelled them. — Heywood's plots have little of artifice 
or regularity of design to recommend them. He writes on care- 
lessly, as it happens, and trusts to Nature, and a certain happy 
tranquillity of spirit, for gaining the favour of the audience. He 
is said, besides attending to his duties as an actor, to have com- 
posed regularly a sheet a day. This may account in some mea- 
sure for the unembarrassed facility of his style. His own ac- 
count makes the number of his writings for the stage, or those 
in which he had a main hand, upwards of two hundred. In 
fact, I do not wonder at any quantity that an author is said 



ON LYLY, MARLOWE, HEYWOOD, ETC. 47 

to have written ; for the more a man writes, the more he can 
write. 

The same remarks will apply, with certain modifications, to 
other remaining works of this writer, the ' Royal King and 
Loyal Subject,' ' A Challenge for Beauty,' and ' The English 
Traveller.' The barb of misfortune is sheathed in the mildness 
of the writer's temperament, and the story jogs on very comfort- 
ably, without effort or resistance, to the euthanasia of the catas- 
trophe. In two of these the person principally aggrieved sur- 
vives, and feels himself none the worse for it. The most splen- 
did passage in Heywood's comedies is the account of Shipwreck 
by Drink, in ' The English Traveller,' which was the founda- 
tion of Cowley's Latin poem, Nanfragium Joculare. 

The names of Middleton and Rowley, with which I shall con- 
clude this Lecture, generally appear together as two writers who 
frequently combined their talents in the production of joint 
pieces. Middleton (judging from their separate works) was 
" the more potent spirit" of the two ; but they were neither of 
them equal to some others. Rowley appears to have excelled 
in describing a certain amiable quietness of disposition and dis- 
interested tone of morality, carried almost to a paradoxical ex- 
cess, as in his ' Fair Quarrel,' and in the comedy of ' A Wo- 
man never Vexed,' which is written in many parts, with a 
pleasing simplicity dnd naivete equal to the novelty of the con- 
ception. Middleton's style was not marked by any peculiar 
quality of his own, but was made up, in equal proportions, of 
the faults and excellences common to his contemporaries. In 
his ' Women beware Women,' there is a rich marrowy vein of 
internal sentmient, with fine occasional insight into human na- 
ture, and cool cutting irony of expression. He is lamentably 
deficient in the plot and denouement of the story. It is like the 
rough draught of a tragedy, with a number of fine things thrown 
in, and the best made use of first ; but it tends to no fixed goal, 
and the interest decreases, instead of increasing as we read on, 
for want of previous aruangement and an eye to the whole. We 
have fine studies of heads, a piece of richly coloured drapery, 
*' a foot, an hand, an eye from Nature drawn, that's worth a his- 
tory ;" but the groups are ill disposed, nor are the figures pro 



48 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

portioned to each other or the size of the canvas. The author's 
power is in the subject, not over it ; or he is in possession of ex- 
cellent materials, which he husbands very ill. This character, 
though it applies more particularly to Middleton, might be ap- 
plied generally to the age. Shakspeare alone seemed to stand 
over his work, and to do what he pleased with it. He saw to 
the end of what he was about, and with the same faculty of 
lending himself to the impulses of Nature and the impression of 
the moment, never forgot that he himself had a task to perform, 
nor the place which each figure ought to occupy in his general 
design. — The characters of Livia, of Brancha, of Leantio and 
his mother, in the play of which 1 am speaking, are all admira- 
bly drawn. The art and malice of Livia show equal want of 
principle and acquaintance with the world ; and the scene in 
which she holds the mother in suspense, while she betrays the 
daughter into the power of the profligate duke, is a master-piece 
of dramatic skill. The proneness of Brancha to tread the prim- 
rose path of pleasure, after she has made the first false step, and 
her sudden transition from unblemished virtue to the most aban- 
doned vice, in which she is notably seconded by her mother-in- 
law's ready submission to the temptations of wealth and power, 
form a true and striking picture. The first intimation of the in- 
trigue that follows, is given in a way that is not a little remark- 
able for simplicity and acuteness. Brancha says, 

" Did not the duke look up 1 Methought he saw us.''" 

To which the more experienced mother answers, 

" That's every one's conceit that sees a duke-, 

If he look stedfastly, he looks straight at them, > 

When he. perhaps, good careful gentleman, 

Never minds any, but the look he casts 

Is at his own intentions, and his object 

Only the public good." 

It turns out, however, that he had been looking at them, and 
not "at the public good." The moral of this tragedy is rendered 
more impressive from the manly, independent character of Lean- 
tio in the first instance, and the manner in which he dwells, in a 
sort of doting abstraction, on his own comforts, of being possessed 



ON LYLY, MARLOWE, HEYWOOD, ETC. 49 

of a beautiful and faithful wife. As he approaches his own 
house, and already treads on the brink of perdition, he exclaims 
with an exuberance of satisfaction not to be restrained — 

" How near am I to a happiness 

That earth exceeds not ! not another Hke it : 

The treasures of the deep are not so precious, 

As are the concealed comforts of a man 

Lock'd up in woman's love. I scent the air 

Of blessings when I come but near the house: 

What a delicious breath marriage sends forth ! 

The violet bed's not sweeter. Honest wedlock 

Is like a banqueting house built in a garden, 

On which the spring's chaste flowers take delight 

To cast their modest odours ; when base lust, 

With all her powders, paintings, and best pride, 

Is but a fair house built by a ditch side. 

When I behold a glorious dangerous strumpet, 

Sparkling in beauty and destnaction too. 

Both at a twinkling, I do liken straight 

Her beautified body to a goodly temple 

That's built on vaults where carcases lie rotting ; 

And so by little and little I shrink back again, 

And quench desire with a cool meditation ; 

And I'm as well, methinks. Now for a welcome 

Able to draw men's envies upon man : 

A kiss now that will hang upon my lip, 

As sweet as morning dew upon a rose. 

And full as long ; after a five days' fast 

She'll be so greedy now and cling about me : 

I take care how I shall be rid of her : 

And here 't begins." 

This dream is dissipated by the entrance of Brancha and his 
Mother. 

" Bran. Oh, sir, you're welcome home. 

Moth. Oh, is he come 1 I am glad on't. 

Lean. {Aside.) Is that all ? 
Why this is dreadful now as sudden death 
To some rich man that flatters all his sins 
With promise of repentance when he's old. 
And dies in the midway before he comes to 't 
Sure you're not well, Brancha ! how dost, prithee % 

Bran. I have been better than I am at this time. 

Lean. Alas, I thought so. 



50 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

Bran. Nay, I have been worse too, 
Than now you see me, sir. 

Lean. I'm glad thou mend'st yet, 
I feel my heart mend too. How came it to thee 7 
Has any thing dishk'd thee in my absence 1 

Bran. No, certain, I have had the best content 
That Florence can afford. 

Lean. Thou makest the best on't: 
Speak, mother, what's the cause 1 you must needs know. 

Moth. Troth, I know none, son; let her speak herself; 
Unless it be the same gave Lucifer a tumbling cast ; that's pride. 

Bran. Methinks this house stands nothing to my mind; 
I'd have some pleasant lodging i' th' high street, sir; 
Or if 'twere near the court, sir, that were much better; 
'Tis a sweet recreation for a gentlewoman 
To stand in a bay-window, and see gallants. 

Lean. Now I have another temper, a mere stranger 
To that of yours, it seems; I should delight 
To see none but yourself 

Bran. I praise not that ; 
Too fond is as unseemly as too churlish ; 
I would not have a husband of that proneness, 
To kiss me before company, for a world; 
Besides, 'tis tedious to see one thing still, sir, 
Be it the best that ever heart affected : 
Nay, wer't yourself, whose love had power you know 
To bring me from my friends, 1 would not stand thus. 
And gaze upon you always ; troth, I could not, sir; 
As good be blind, and have no use of sight, 
As look on one thing still : what's the eye's treasure, 
But change of objects 1 You are learned, sir. 
And know I speak not ill ; 'tis full as virtuous 
For woman's eye to look on several men. 
As for her heart, sir, to be fixed on one. 

Lean. Now, thou com'st home to me ; a kiss for that woi'd. 

Bran. No matter for a kiss, sir ; let it pass ; 
'Tis but a toy, we'll not so much as mind it; 
Let's talk of other business, and forget it. 
What news now of the pirates'? any stiiTingl 
Prithee discourse a little. 

MotJi. (Aside.) I'm glad he's here yet. 
To see her tricks himself; I had lied monstrously 
If I had told 'em first. 

Lean. Speak, what's the humour, sweet, 
You make your lips so strange 1 This was not wont 

Bran. Is there no kindness betwixt man and wife, 
Unless they make a pigeon-house of friendship, 



ON LYLY, MARLOWE, HEYWOOD, ETC. 51 

And be still billing 1 'Tis the idlest fondness 
That ever was invented ; and 'lis pity- 
It's grown a fashion for poor gentlewomen ; 
There's many a disease kiss'd in a year by't, 
And a French court'sy made to't. Alas, sir, 
Think of tlie world, how we shall live, grow serious; 
We have been married a whole fortnight now. 

Lean. How'? a whole fortnight! why, is that so long 1 

Bran. 'Tis time to leave off dalliance; 'tis a doctrine 
Of your own teaching, if you be remember'd, 
And I was bound to obey it. 

Moth. {Aside.) Here's one fits him; 
This was well catch'd i' faith, son, like a fellow 
That rids another country of a plague, 
And brings it home with him to his own house. 

\_A messenger from the Duke knocks within. 
Who knocks'? 

Lean. Who's there now'? Withdraw you, Brancha; 
Thou art a gem no stranger's eye must see, 
Howe'er thou'rt pleas'd now to look dull on me. [Exit Brancha." 

The Witch of Middleton is his most remarkable performance ; 
both on its own account, and from the use that Shakspeare has 
made of some of the characters and speeches in his ' Macbeth.' 
Though the employment which Middleton has given to Hecate 
and the rest, in thwarting the purposes and perplexing the busi- 
ness of familiar and domestic life, is not so grand or appalling as 
the more stupendous agency which Shakspeare has assigned 
them, yet it is not easy to deny the merit of the first invention to 
Middleton, who has embodied the existing superstitions of the 
time, respecting that anomalous class of beings, with a high 
spirit of poetry, of the most grotesque and fanciful kind. The 
songs and incantations made use of are very nearly the same. 
The other parts of this play are not so good; and the soliltion of 
the principal difficulty, by Antonio's falling down a trap-door, 
most lame and impotent. As a specimen of the similarity of the 
preternatural machinery, I shall here give one entire scene. 

" The Witches' Habitation. 
Enter Heccat, Stadlin, Hoppo, and other Witches. 
Hec. The moon's a gallant: see how brisk she rides. 
Stad. Here's a rich evening, Heccat. 
Hec. Aye, is 't not, wenches, 
To take a journey of five thousand miles 1 



THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



Hop. Ours will be more to-night. 

Hec. Oh, 't will be precious. Heard you the owl yet '? 

S ad. Briefly, in the copse, 
As we came through- now. 

Hec. 'Tis high time for us then. 

Stad. There was a bat hung at my lips three times 
As we came through the woods, and drank her fill : 
Old Puckle saw her. 

H'x. You are fortunate still, 
The very scritch-owl lights upon your shoulder, 
And woos you like a pigeon. Are you furnish'd 1 
Have you your ointments 1 

Stad. All. 

Hec. Prepare to flight then. 
I'll overtake you swiftly. 

Stad. Hie then, Heccat! 
We shall be up betimes. 

Hec. I'll reach you quickly. [ Tkey ascend. 

Enter Firestone. 

Fire. They are all going a-birding to-night. They talk of fowls i' th' air, 
that fly by day, I'm sure ther'U be a company of foul sluts there to-night. If 
we have not mortality affeared, I'll be hang'd,for they are able to putrify it, to 
infect a whole region. She spies me now. 

Hec. What, Firestone, our sweet son % 

Fire. A little sweeter than some of you : or a dunghill were too good for me. 

Hec. How much hast there 1 

Fire. Nineteen, and all brave plump ones ; besides six lizards, and three 
serpentine eggs. 

Hec. Dear and sweet boy ! What herbs hast thou 1 

Fire. I have some mar-martin and man-dragon. 

Hec. Marmariitin, and mandragora, thou would'st say. 

Fire. Here's pannax, too. I thank thee; my pan akes, I am sure, with 
kneeling down to cut 'em. 

He. And selago, 
Hedge-hissop, too ! How near he goes my cuttings ! 
Were they all crept by moon-light'? 

Fire. Every blade of 'em, or I am a moon-calf, mother. 

Hec. Hie thee home with 'em. 
Look well to th' house to-night : I'm for aloft. 

Fire. Aloft, quoth you % I would you would break your neck once, that 
I might have all quickly {Aside.)— B^oxk^ hark, mother! They are above the 
steeple already, flying over your head with a noise of musicians. 

Hec. They are indeed. Help me ! Help me! I'm too late else. 
SONG {in the air above.) 
Come away, come away ! 
Heccat, Heccat, come away ! 



ON LYLY, MARLOWE, HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON, ETC. 53 

Hec. I come, I come, I come, 1 come, 

With all tlie speed I may, 
With all the speed I may. 
Where's Stadlin '? 
(Above.) Here. 

Hec. Where's Puckle'? 

(^Above.) Here: 

And Hoppo too, and Hellwain too ; 
We lack but you, we lack but you. 
Come away, make up ihe count 
Hec. I will but 'noint, and then I mount. 

{A Spirit descends in the shape of a cat.') 
{Above.) There's one come down to fetch his dues ; 

A kiss, a coll, a sip of blood ; 
And why thou stay'st so long, I muse, I muse, 
Since th' air's so sweet and good % 
Hec. Oh, art thou come, 

What news, what news '? 
Spirit. All goes still to our dehght, 

Either come, or else 
Refuse, refuse. 
Hec. Now lam furnish'd for the flight. 

Fire. Hark, hark ! The cat sings a brave treble in her own lan- 

guage. 
Mec. {Ascending loith the Spirit.) 
Now I go, now I fly, 
Malkin, my sweet spirit, and I, 
Oh, what a dainty pleasure 'tis 
To ride in the air 
When the moon shines fair. 
And sing, p-nd dance, and toy, and kiss ! 
Over woods, high rocks, and mountains. 
Over seas our mistress' fountains. 
Over steep towers and turrets 
We fly by night, 'mongst troops of spirits. 
No ring of bells to our ears sounds, 
No howls of wolves, no yelps of hounds ; 
No, not the noise of water's breach. 
Or cannon's roar our height can reach. 
{Above.) No ring of bells, &c. 

Fire. Well, mother, I thank your kindness. You must be gamboling 
i' the air, and leave me to walk here like a fool and a mortal. [Exit. 

The incantation scene at the cauldron is also the original of 
that in Macbeth, and is in like manner introduced by the Duchess's 
visiting the Witches' habitation. 



54 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

" TIte Witches' Habitation. 
Enter Duchkss, Hkccat, Firestone, 
Hec. What death is 't you desire for Almachildes 1 
Duck. A sudden and a subtle, 
Hec. Then I've fitted you. 
Here lie the gifts of both ; sudden and subtle; 
His picture made in wax and gently molten 
By a blue fire kindled with dead men's eyes, 
Will waste him by degrees, 
Dicch. In what time, pr'ythee '? 
Hec. Perhaps in a month's progress. 
Duck. What! A months 
Out upon pictures, if they be so tedious; 
Give me things with some life, 
Hec. Then seek no farther. 

Duck. This must be done with speed, dispatched this night, 
If it may possibly. 

Hec. I have it for you : 
Here's that will do't. Stay but perfection's time. 
And that's not five hours hence. 
Ditch. Can'st thou do this 1 
Hec. CanH 
Ditch. I mean, so closely, 
Hec. So closely do you mean too % 
Duck. So artfully, so cunningly. 
Hec. Worse and worse ; doubts and incredulities. 
They make me mad. Let scrupulous creatures know, 
Cum volui, ripis ipsis mirantibus, amnes 
In fontes rediere suos: concussaque sisto, 
Stantia concutio cantu freta; nubila pello, 
Nubilaque induco : ventos abigoque vocoque. 
Vipereas rumpo verbis et carmine fauces; 
Et silvas moveo, jubeoque tremiscere montes, 
Et mugire solum, manesque exire sepulchris. 
Te quoque, Luna, traho. 
Can you doubt me then, daughter 1 

That can make mountains tremble, miles of woods walk ; 
Whole earth's foundations bellow, and the spirits 
Of the entomb'd to burst out from their marbles ; 
Nay, draw yon moon to my involv'd designs 1 

Fire. I know as well as can be when my mother's mad, and our great cat 
angry ; for the one spits French then, and the other spits Latin. 
Ditch. I did not doubt you, mother. 
Hec. No 1 what did you 1 
My power's so firm, it is not to be queslion'd. 

Ditch. Forgive what's past : and now I know th' ofFensiveness 
That vexes art, I'll shun the occasion ever. 



ON LYLY, MARLOWE, HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON, ETC. 55 

Hec. Leave all to me and my five sisters, daughter. 
It shall be conveyed in at howlet-time. 
Take you no care. My spirits know their moments ; 
Raven or scritch-owl never fly by th' door, 
But they call in (I thank 'era), and they lose not by 't. 
I give 'em barley soak'd in infants' blood : 
They shall have semina cum sanguine, 
Their gorge cramm'd full, if they come once to our house : 
We are no niggard. [Exit Duchess. 

Fire. They fare but too well when they come hither. They ate up as 
much t' other night as would have made me a good conscionable pudding. 

Hec. Give me some lizard's brain : quickly, Firestone ! 
Where's gi-annam Stadlin, and all the rest o' th' sisters'? 

F-ire. All at hand, forsooth. [ The other Witches appear. 

Hec. Give me marmaritin ; some bear-breech. When 1 

Fire. Here's bear-breech and lizard's brain, forsooth. 

Hec. Into the vessel ; 
And fetch three ounces of the red-hair'd girl 
I kill'd last midnight. 

Fire. Whereabout, sweet mother ^ 

Hec. Hip ; hip or flank. Where is the acopus 1 

Fire. You shall have acopus, forsooth. 

Hec. Stii-, stir about, whilst I begin the charm. 

A CHARM SONG. 
( TVie Witches going about the cauldron.) 
Black spirits, and white ; red spirits, and grey ; 
, Mingle, mingle, mingle, you that mingle may. 

Titty, Tiflin, keep it stiff in ; 
Firedrake, Puckey, make it lucky 5 
Liard, Robin, you must bob in. 
Round, around, around, about, about ; 
AH ill come running in ; all good keep out ! 

1st Witch. Here's the blood of a bat. 

Hec. Put in that ; oh, put in that. 

^nd Witch. Here's libbard's-bane. 

Hec. Put in again. 

1st Witch. The juice of toad; the oil of adder. 

'S.nd Witch. Those will make the younker madder. 

Hec. Put in ; there's all, and rid the stench. 

Fire. Nay, here's three ounces of the red-hair'd wench. 

All. Round, around, around, &c. 

Hec. So, so, enough : into the vessel with it. 

There ; 't hath the true perfection. I'm so light 

At any mischief: there's no villany 

But is a tune, methinks. 



56 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

Fire. A tune ! 'Tis to the tune of damnation then, I warrant you, and that 
song hath a villanous burthen. 
Hec. Come, my sweet sisters ; let the air strike our tune 

Whilst we show reverence to yon peeping moon. 

[ The Witches dance and then exeunt^ 

I will conclude this account with Mr. Lamb's observations on 
the distinctive characters of these extraordinary and formidable 
personages, as they are described by Middleton or Shakspeare : 

" Though some resemblance may be traced between the 
Charms in Macbeth and the Incantations in this play, which is sup- 
posed to have preceded it, this coincidence will not detract much 
from the originality of Shakspeare. His witches are distinguished 
from the witches of Middleton by essential differences. These 
are creatures to whom man or woman, plotting some dire mis- 
chief, might resort for occasional consultation. Those originate 
deeds of blood, and begin bad impulses to men. From the mo- 
ment that their eyes first meet Macbeth's, he is spell-bound. 
That meeting sways his destiny. He can never break the fasci- 
nation. These Witches can hurt the body ; those have power 
over the soul. Hecate, in Middleton, has a son, a low buffoon : 
the Hags of Shakspeare have neither child of their own, nor 
seem to be descended from any parent. They are foul anomalies, 
of whom we know not whence they sprung, nor whether they 
have beginning or ending. As they are without human passions, 
so they seem to be without human relations. They come with 
thunder and lightning, and vanish to airy music. This is 
all we know of them. Except Hecate, they have no names, 
which heightens their mysteriousness. The names, and some 
of the properties which Middleton has given to his Hags, excite 
smiles. The Weird Sisters are serious things. Their presence 
cannot co-exist with mirth. But in a lesser degree, the Witches 
of Middleton are fine creations. Their power too is, in some 
measure, over the mind. They ' raise jars, jealousies, strifes, 
like a thick scurf o'er life.' "* 



* Lamb's ' Specimens of English Dramatic Poets.' Vol L p. 187. Moxon, 
London. 



ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN/DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 57 



LECTURE III. 

On Marston, Chapman, Decker, and Webster. 

The writers of whom I have already treated may be said to have 
been "no mean men;" those of whom I have yet to speak are 
certainly no whit inferior. Would that I could do them anything 
like justice ! It is not difficult to give at least their seeming due 
to great and well-known names ; for the sentiments of the reader 
meet the descriptions of the critic more than half way, and 
clothe what is perhaps vague and extravagant praise with a sub- 
stantial form and distinct meaning. But in attempting to extol 
the merits of an obscure work of genius, our words are either 
lost in empty air, or are " blown stifling back" upon the mouth 
that utters them. The greater those merits are, and the truer 
the praise, the more suspicious and disproportionate does it al- 
most necessarily appear ; for it has no relation to any image pre- 
viously existing in the public mind, and therefore looks like an 
imposition fabricated out of nothing. In this case, the only way 
that I know of is, to make these old writers (as much as can be) 
vouchers for their own pretensions, which they are well able to 
make good. I shall in the present lecture give some account of 
Marston and Chapman, and afterwards of Decker and Webster. 
Marston is a writer of great merit, who rose to tragedy from 
the ground of comedy, and whoseybr^e was not sympathy, either 
with the stronger or softer emotions, but an impatient scorn and 
bitter indignation against the vices and follies of men, which 
vented itself either in comic irony or in lofty invective. He was 
properly a satirist. He was not a favourite with his contempo- 
raries, nor they with him. He was first on terms of great inti- 
macy, and afterwards at open war, with Ben Jonson ; and he is 
most unfairly criticized in The Return from Parnassus, under 
the name of Monsieur Kinsayder, as a mere libeller and buffoon. 
Writers in their life-time do all they can to degrade and vilify 
5 



58 THE AGE pF ELIZABETH. 

one another, and expect posterity to have a very tender care of 
their reputations ! The writers of this age, in general, cannot 
however be reproached with this infirmity. The number of 
plays that they wrote in conjunction is a proof of the contrary ; 
and a circumstance no less curious, as to the division of intellec- 
tual labour, than the cordial union of sentiment it implied. Un- 
like most poets, the love of their art surmounted their hatred of 
one another. Genius was not become a vile and vulgar pretence, 
and they respected in others what they knew to be true inspira- 
tion in themselves. They courted the applause of the multitude, 
but came to one another for judgment and assistance. When 
we see these writers working together on the same admirable 
productions, year after year, as was the case with Beaumont and 
Fletcher, Middleton and Rowley, with Chapman, Decker, and 
Jonson, it reminds one of Ariosto's eloquent apostrophe to the 
Spirit of Ancient Chivalry, when he has seated his rival knights, 
Renaldo and Ferraw, on the same horse : 

" Oh ancient knights of true and noble heart, 
They rivals were, one faith they liv'd not under 
Besides, they felt their bodies shrewdly smart 
Of blows late given, and yet (behold a wonder) 
Thro' thick and thin, suspicion set apart, 
Like friends they ride, and parted not asunder, 
Until the horse with double spurring drived 
Unto a way parted in two, arrived."* 

Marston's Antonio and Mellida is a tragedy of considerable 
force and pathos ; but in the most critical parts, the author fre- 
quently breaks off or flags without any apparent reason but 
want of interest in his subject ; and farther, the best and most 
affecting situations and bursts of feeling are too evidently imita- 
tions of Shakspeare. Thus the unexpected meeting between 
Andrugio and Lucio, in the beginning of the third act, is a direct 
counterpart of that between Lear and Kent, only much weakened : 
and the interview between Antonio and Mellida has a strong re- 
semblance to the still more affecting one between Lear and Cor- 
delia, and is most wantonly disfigured by the sudden introduction 

* Sir John Harrington'stranslation. 



ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 59 

of half a page of Italian rhymes, which gives the whole an air 
of burlesque. The conversation of Lucio and Andrugio, again, 
after his defeat, seems to invite, but will not bear a comparison 
with Richard the Second's remonstrance with his courtiers, who 
offered him consolation in his misfortunes ; and no one can be at 
a loss to trace the allusion to Romeo's conduct on being apprized 
of his banishment, in the termination of the following speech : 

*' Antonio. Each man takes hence life, but no man death; 
He's a good fellow, and keeps open house ; 
A thousand thousand ways lead to his gate, 
To his wide-mouthed porch : when niggard life 
Hath but one little, little wicket through. 
We wring ourselves into this wretched world 
To pule and weep, exclaim, to curse and rail, 
To fret and ban the fates, to strike the earth 
As I do now. Antonio, curse thy birth, 
And die." 

The following short passage might be quoted as one of exqui- 
site beauty and originality — 

— "As having clasp'd a rose 
Within my palm, the rose being ta'en away, 
My hand retains a little breath of sweet ; 
So may man's trunk, his spirit slipp'd away, 
Hold still a faint perfume of his sweet guest." 

Act IV, Scene 1. 

The character of Felice in this play is an admirable satirical 
accompaniment, and is the favourite character of this author (in 
all probability his own), that of a shrewd, contemplative cynic, 
and sarcastic spectator in the drama of human life. It runs 
through all his plays, is shared by Quadratus and Lampatho in 
* What you Will,' (it is into the mouth of the last ot' these that 
he has put that fine invective against the uses of philosophy, in 
the account of himself and his spaniel, " who still slept while he 
baus'd leaves, tossed o'er the dunces, por'd on the old print"), 
and is at its height in the Fawn and Malevole, in his ' Parasitas- 
ter' and ' Malcontent.' These two comedies are his chef-d'xu- 
vres. The character of the Duke Hercules of Ferrara, disguised 
as the Parasite, in the first of these, is well sustained throughout, 



60 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

with great sense, dignity, and spirit. He is a wise censurer of 
men and things, and rails at the world with charitable bitter- 
ness. He may put in a claim to a sort of family likeness to 
the Duke, in ' Measure for Measure,' only the latter descends 
from his elevation to watch in secret over serious crimes ; the 
other is only a spy on private follies. There is something in 
this cast of character (at least in comedy — perhaps it neutral- 
izes the tone and interest in tragedy), that finds a wonderful 
reciprocity in the breast of the reader or audience. It forms a 
kind of middle term or point of union between the busy actors 
in the scene and the indifferent bystander, insinuates the plot, and 
suggests a number of good wholesome reflections, for the saga- 
city and honesty of which we do not fail to take credit to our- 
selves. We are let into its confidence, and have a perfect 
reliance on its sincerity. Our sympathy with it is without any 
drawback ; for it has no part to perform itself, and " is nothing, 
if not critical." It is a sure card to play. We may doubt the 
motives of heroic actions, or differ about the just limits and 
extreme workings of the passions; but the professed misanthrope 
is a character that no one need feel any scruples in trusting, 
since the dislike of folly and knavery in the abstract is common 
to knaves and fools with the wise and honest ! Besides the in- 
structive moral vein of Hercules as the Fawn or Parasitaster, 
which contains a world of excellent matter most aptly and wittily 
delivered, there are two other characters perfectly hit off, Gon- 
zago, the old prince of Urbino, and Granuffo, one of his lords in 
waiting. The loquacious, good-humoured, undisguised vanity 
of the one is excellently relieved by the silent gravity of the 
other. The wit of this last character (Granuffo) consists in his 
not speaking a word through the whole play ; he never contra- 
dicts what is said, and only assents by implication. He is a 
most infallible courtier, and follows the prince like his shadow, 
who thus graces his pretensions. 

" We would be private, only Faunus stay ; he is a wise fellow, daughter, 
a veiy wise fellow, for he is still just of my opinion ; my Lord Granuffo, you 
may likewise stay, for I know you'll say nothing." 

And again, a little farther on, he says— 

" Faunus, this Granuffo is a right wise good lord, a man of excellent dis- 



ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 61 

course, and never speaks; his signs to me and men of profound reach instruct 
abundantly ; he begs suits with signs, gives thanks with signs, puts off his 
hat leisurely, maintains his beard learnedly, keeps his lust privately, makes a 
nodding leg courtly, and lives happily." — " Silence," [replies Hercules,] " is 
an excellent modest grace ; but especially before so instructing a wisdom as 
that of your Excellency." 

The garrulous self-complacency of this old lord is kept up in 
a vein of pleasant humour ; an instance of which might be given 
in his owning of some learned man, that " though he was no 
duke, yet he was wise ;" and the manner in which the others 
play upon this foible, and make him contribute to his own dis- 
comfiture, without his having the least suspicion of the plot 
against him, is full of ingenuity and counterpoint. In the last 
scene he says, very characteristically, 

" Of all creatures breathing, I do hate those things that struggle to seem 
wise, and yet are indeed very fools. I remember when I was a young man, 
in my father's days, there were four gallant spirits for resolution, as proper for 
body, as witty in discourse, as any were in Europe ; nay, Europe had not 
such, I was one of them. We four did all love one lady ; a most chaste 
virgin she was: we all enjoyed her, and so enjoyed her, that, despite the 
strictest guard was set upon her, we had her at our pleasure. I speak it for 
her honour, and my credit. Where shall you find such witty fellows novv-a- 
days 1 Alas ! how easy is it in these weaker times to cross love-tricks ! Ha ! 
ha! ha! Alas, alas! I smile to think (I must confess with some glory to 
mine own wisdom), to think how I found out, and crossed, and curbed, and 
in the end made desperate Tiberio's love. Alas ! good silly youth, that dared 
to cope with age and such a beard ! 

Heracles. But what yet might your well-known wisdom think, 
If such a one, as being most severe, 
A most protested opposite to the match 
Of two young lovers; who having barr'd them speech, 
All interviews, all messages, all means 
To plot their wished ends ; even he himself 
Was by their cunning made the go-between, 
The only messenger, the token carrier ; 
Told them the times when they might fitly meet, 
Nay, show'd the way to one another's bed V 

To which Gonzago replies, in a strain of exulting dotage 

*' May one have the sight of such a fellow for nothing "? Doth there breathe 
such an egregious assl Is there such a foolish animal in remm natura? 
How is it possible such a simplicity can exist 1 Let us not lose our laughing 



THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



at him, for God's sake ; let folly's sceptre light upon him, and to the Ship of 
Fools with him instantly, 

Dondolo. Of all these follies I arrest your grace." 

Moliere has built a play on nearly the same foundation, which 
is not much superior to the present. Marston, among other 
topics of satire, has a fling at the pseudo-critics and philosophers 
of his time, who were " full of wise saws and modern instances." 
Thus he freights his Ship of Fools. 

" Dondolo. Yes, yes; but they got a supersedeas; all of them proved 
themselves either knaves or madmen, and so were let go: there's none left 
now in our ship but a few citizens that let their wives keep their shop-books, 
some philosophers, and a few critics ; one of which critics has lost his flesh 
with fishing at the measure of Plautus' verses ; another has vowed to get the 
consumption of the lungs, or to leave to posterity the true orthography and 
pronK«iciation of laughing. 

Hercules. But what philosophers ha' ye 7 

Dondolo. Oh, very strange fellows ; one knows nothing, dares not aver he 
irves, goes, sees, feels. 

Nymphadoro. A most insensible philosopher. 

Dondolo. Another, that there is no present time ; and that one man to-day 
and to-morrow, is not the same man ; so that he that yesterday owed money, 
to-day owes none ; because he is not the same man. 

Herod. Would that philosophy hold good in law ? 

Hercules. But why has the Duke thus laboured to have all the fools ship- 
ped out of his dominions 1 

Dondolo. Marry, because he would play the fool alone without any rival. 

Act IV. 

Moliere has enlarged upon the same topic in his Manage 
Force, but not with more point or effect. Nymphadoro's reasons 
for devoting himself to the sex generally, and Hercules's descrip- 
tion of the different qualifications of different men, will also be 
found to contain excellent specimens, both of style and matter. 
The disguise of Hercules as the Fawn is assumed voluntarily, 
and he is comparatively a calm and dispassionate observer of the 
times. Malevole's disguise in the Malcontent has been forced 
upon him by usurpation and injustice, and hi& invectives are ac- 
cordingly more impassioned and virulent. His satire does not 
" like a wild goose fly, unclaimed of any man," but has a bitter 
and personal application. Take him in the words of the usurp- 
ing Duke's account of him : 



ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 63 

" This Malevole is one of the most prodigious affections that ever conversed 
with Nature ; a man, or rather a monster, more discontent than Lucifer when 
he was thrust out of the presence. His appetite is unsatiable as the grave, as 
far from any content as from heaven. His highest delight is to procure others 
vexation, and therein he thinks he truly serves heaven ; for 'tis his position, 
whosoever in this earth can be contented is a slave, and damned ; therefore does 
he afflict all, in that to which they are most affected. The elements struggle 
with him ; his own soul is at variance with herself; his speech is halter- 
worthy at all hours. I like him, 'faith ; he gives good intelligence to my 
spirit, makes me understand those weaknesses which others' flattery palliates. 

Hark! they sing, 

Enter Malevole, after the song. ' 

Pietro Jacomo. See he comes ! Now shall you hear the extremity of a 
Malcontent; he is as free as air; he blows over every man. And — Sir, 
whence come you nowl 

Malevole. From the public place of much dissimulation, the church. 

Pietro Jacomo. What didst there 1 

Malevole. Talk with a usurer ; take up at interest. 

Pietro Jacomo, I wonder what religion thou art of? 

Malevole. Of a soldier's religion. 

Pietro Jacomo. And what dost think makes most infidels now *? 

Malevole. Sects, sects. I am weary ; would I were one of the Duke's 
hounds. 

Pietro Jacomo. But what's the common news abroad *? Thou dogg'st 
rumour still. 

Malevole. Common news 1 Why, common words are, God save ye, Fare 
ye well : common actions, flattery and cozenage : common things, women and 
cuckolds." 

Act I. Scene 3. 

In reading all this, one is somehow reminded perpetually of 
Mr. Kean's acting : in Shakspeare we do not often think of him, 
except in those parts which he constantly acts, and in those one 
cannot forget him. I might observe on the above passage, in ex- 
cuse for some bluntness of style, that the ideal barrier between 
names and things seems to have been greater then than now. 
Words have become instruments of more importance than form- 
erly. To mention certain actions, is almost to participate in 
them, as if consciousness were the same as guilt. The standard 
of delicacy varies at different periods, as it does in different coun- 
tries, and is not a general test of superiority. The French, who 
pique themselves (and justly, in some particulars) on their quick- 
ness of tact and refinement of breeding, say and do things which 
we, a plainer and coarser people, could not think of without a 



64 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

blush. What would seem gross allusions to us at present, were 
without offence to our ancestors, and many things passed for jests 
with them, or matters of indifference, which would not now be 
endured. Refinement of language, however, does not keep pace 
with simplicity of manners. The severity of criticism exercised 
in our theatres towards some unfortunate straggling phrases in 
the old comedies, is but an ambiguous compliment to the immacu- 
late purity of modern times. Marston's style was by no means 
more guarded than that of his contemporaries. He was also 
much more of a free-thinker than Marlowe, and there is a fre- 
quent and not unfavourable allusion, in his works, to later scepti- 
cal opinions. In the play of the ' Malcontent' we meet with an 
occasional mixture of comic gaiety, to relieve the more serious 
and painful business of the scene, as in the easy loquacious ef- 
frontery of the old intriguante Maquerella, and in the ludicrous 
facility with which the idle courtiers avoid or seek the notice of 
Malevole, as he is in or out of favour ; but the general tone and 
import of the piece is severe and moral. The plot is somewhat 
too intricate and too often changed (like the shifting of a scene,) 
so as to break and fritter away the interest at the end ; but the 
part of Aurelia, the Duchess of Pietro Jacomo, a dissolute and 
proud-spirited woman, is the highest strain of Marston's pen. 
The scene in particular, in which she receives and exults in the 
supposed news of her husband's death, is nearly unequalled in 
boldness of conception and in the unrestrained force of passion, 
taking away not only the consciousness of guilt, but overcoming 
the sense of shame.* 

Next to Marston, I must put Chapman, whose name is better 
known as the translator of Homer than as a dramatic writer. 
He is, like Marston, a philosophic observer, a didactic reasoner : 
but he has both more gravity in his tragic style, and more levity 
in his comic vein. His ' Bussy d'Ambois,' though not without 
interest or some fancy, is rather a collection of apophthegms or 
pointed sayings in the form of a dialogue, than a poem or a 
tragedy. In his verses the oracles have not ceased. Every 
other line is an axiom in morals — a libel on mankind, if truth is 

* See conclusion of Lecture IV. 



ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 65 

a libel. He is too stately for a wit, in his serious writings — too 
formal for a poet. ' Bussy d'Ambois' is founded on a French 
plot and French manners. The character, from which it derives 
its name, is arrogant and ostentatious to an unheard-of degree, 
but full of nobleness and lofty spirit. His pride and unmeasured 
pretensions alone take away from his real merit ; and by the 
quarrels and intrigues in which they involve him, bring about 
the catastrophe, which has considerable grandeur and imposing 
effect, in the manner of Seneca. Our author aims at the highest 
things in poetry, and tries in vain, wanting imagination and pas- 
sion, to fill up the epic moulds of tragedy with sense and reason 
alone, so that he often runs into bombast and turgidity — is extra- 
vagant and pedantic at one and the same time. From the nature 
of the plot, which turns upon a love intrigue, much of the philo- 
sophy of this piece relates to the character of the sex. Milton 
says 



" The way of woman's will is hard to hit. 



But old Chapman professes to have found the clue to it, and 
winds his uncouth way through all the labyrinth of love. Its 
deepest recesses " hide nothing from his view." The close in^ 
trigues of court policy, the subtle workings of the human soul, 
move before him like a sea, dark, deep, and glittering with wrinkles 
for the smile of beauty. Fulke Greville alone could go beyond 
him in gravity and mystery. The plays of the latter (Mustapha 
and Alaham) are abstruse as the mysteries of old, and his style 
inexplicable as the riddles of the Sphinx. As an instance of his 
love for the obscure, the marvellous, and impossible, he calls up 
" the ghost of one of the old kings of Ormus," as a prologue to 
one of his tragedies ; a very reverend and inscrutable personage, 
who, we may be sure, blabs no living secrets. Chapman, in his 
other pieces, where he lays aside the gravity of the philosopher 
and poet, discovers an unexpected comic vein, distinguished by 
equal truth of nature and lively good humour. I cannot say 
that this character pervades any one of his entire comedies ; 
but the introductory sketch of Monsieur D 'Olive is the undoubted 
prototype of that light, flippant, gay, and infinitely delightful 
class of character, of the professed men of wit and pleasure 



ee THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

about town, which we have in such perfection in Wycherly and 
Congreve, such as Sparkish, Witwoud, and Petulant, &c., both 
in the sentiments and in the style of writing. For example, 
take the last scene of the first act. 

Enter D'Olive. 

Rhoderique. What, Monsieur D'Olive, the only admirer of wit and good 
words. 

D'Olive. Morrow, wits: morrow, good wits: my little parcels of wit, I 
have rods in pickle for you. How dost, Jack ; may I call thee, sir, Jack 
yetl 

Mugeron. You may, sir; sir's as commendable an addition as Jack, for 
aught I know. 

D'Ol. I know it, Jack, and as common too. 

JRkod. Go to, you may cover ; we have taken notice of your embroidered 
beaver, 

D'Ol. Look you: by heaven thou'rt one of the maddest bitter slaves in 
Europe : I do but wonder how I made shift to love thee all this while 

Rhod. Go to, what might such a parcel-gilt cover be worth 1 

Mug. Perhaps more than the whole piece beside. 

D'Ol. Good i'faith, but bitter. Oh, you mad slaves, I think you had 
Satyrs to your sires, yet I must love you, I must take pleasure in you, and 
i'faith tell me, how is't 1 live I see you do, but how '? but how, wits 1 

Rhod. 'Faith, as you see, like poor younger brothers. 

D'OL By your wits'? 

Mug. Nay, not turned poets, neither. 

D'Ol. Good in sooth! But indeed, to say truth, time was when the sons 
of the Muses had the privilege to live only by their wits, but times are altered ; 
monopolies are now called in, and wit's become a free trade for all sorts to 
live by : lawyers live by wit, and they live worshipfully : soldiers live by wit, 
and they live honourably : panders live by wit, and they live honestly : in a 
word, there are but few trades but live by wit, only bawds and midwives by 
woman's labours, as fools and fiddlers do making mirth, pages and parasites 
by making legs, painters and players by making mouths and faces : ha, does't 
well, wits 1 

Rhod. 'Faith, thou foUowest a figure in thy jests, as country gentlemen fol- 
low fashions, when they be worn threadbare. 

D'Ol. Well, well, let's leave these wit skirmishes, and say when shall we 
meet'? 

Mug. How think you, are we not met now 1 

D'Ol. Tush, man! I mean at my chamber, where we may make free use 
of ourselves ; that is, drink sack, and talk satire, and let our wits run the wild- 
goose chase over court and country. I will have my chamber the rendezvous 
of all good wits, the shop of good words, the mint of good jests, an ordinary 
of fine discourse ; critics, essayists, linguists, poets, and other professors of 



ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 67 

that faculty of wit, shall at certain hours i' th' day, resort thither ; it shall be 
a second Sorbonne, where all doubts or differences of learning, honour, duel- 
ism, criticism, and poetry, shall be disputed : and how, wits, do ye follow the 
court still 1 

Rhod. Close at heels, sir ; and I can tell you, you have much to answer to 
your stars, that you do not so too. 

D^Ol. As why, wits'? as whyl 

Rhod. Why, sir, the court's as 'twere the stage : and they that have a good 
suit of parts and qualities ought to press thither to grace them, and receive 
their due merit. 

D'Ol. Tush, let the court follow me: he that soars too near the sun, melts 
his wings many times; as I am, I possess myself, I enjoy my liberty, my 
learning, my wit : as for wealth and honour, let 'em go ; I'll not lose my learn- 
ing to be a lord, nor my wit to be an alderman. 

Mug. Admirable D'Olive ! 

D^Ol. And what! you stand gazing at this comet here, ajid admire it, I 
dare say. 

Rhod. And do not you 7 

D'Ol. Not I, I admire nothing but wit. 

Rhod. But I wonder how she entertains time in that solitary cell : does she 
not take tobacco, think you 1 

D^OL. She does, she does; others make it their physic, she makes it her 
food: her sister and she take it by turn, first one, then the other, and Vandome 
ministers to them both. 

Mug. How sayest thou by that Helen of Greece the Countess's sister % 
here were a paragon. Monsieur D'Olive, to admire and marry too. 

D'Ol. Not for me. 

Rhod. No ! what exceptions lie against the choice 1 

D'Ol. Tush, tell me not of choice ; if I stood affected that way, I would 
choose my wife as men do valentines, blindfold or draw cuts for them, for so 
I shall be sure not to be deceived in choosing; for take this of me, there's ten 
times more deceit in women than in horse flesh ; and I say still, that a pretty 
well-paced chamber-maid is the only fashion ; if she grows full or fulsome, 
give her but sixpence to buy her a hand-basket, and send her the way of all 
flesh, there's no more but so. 

M^ig. Indeed that's the savingest way. 

D'Ol. O me ! what a hell 'tis for a man to be tied to the continual charge 
of a coach, with the appurtenances, horses, men, and so forth: and then to 
have a man's house pestered with a whole country of guests, grooms, pan- 
ders, waiting maids, &c. I careful to please my wife, she careless to displease 
me ; shrewish if she be honest ; intolerable if she be wise ; imperious as an 
empress ; all she does must be law, all she says gospel : oh, what a penance 
'tis to endure her ! I glad to forbear still, all to keep her loyal, and yet per- 
haps when all's done, my heir shall be like my horse-keeper : Fie on't ! the very 
thought of marriage were able to cool the hottest liver in France. 

Rhod. Well, I durst venture twice the price of your gilt coney's wool, we 
fihail have you change your copy ere a twelvemonth's day. 



THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



Mug. "We must have you dubb'd o' th' order ; there's no remedy : you that 
have, unmarried, done such honourable service in the commonwealth, must 
needs receive the honour due to 't in marriage. 

Rhod. That he may do, and never marry. 

D'Ol. As how, wits 1 I'faith as howl 

JRkod. For if he can prove his father was free o' th' order, and that he was 
his father's son, then, by the laudable custom of the city, he maybe a cuckold 
by his father's copy, and never serve for 't. 

D'Ol. Ever good, i'faith ! 

Mug. Nay, how can he plead that, when 'tis as well known his father 
died a bachelor 1 

D'Ol. Bitter, in verity, bitter! But good still in its kind. 

Rhod. Go to, we must have you follow the lantern of your forefathers. 

Mvg. His forefathers 1 'Sbody, had he more fathers than one 1 

D'Ol. Why, this is right : here's wit canvast out on 's coat, into 's jacket: 
the string sounds ever well, that rubs not too much o' th' frets : I must love 
you, wits, I must take pleasure in you. Farewell, good wits : you know my 
lodging, make an errand thither now and then, and save your ordinary; do, 
wits, do. 

Mug. We shall be troublesome t' ye. 

D'Ol. O God, sir, you wrong me, to think I can be troubled with wit: 
I love a good wit as I love myself: if you need a brace or two of crowns at 
any time, address but your sonnet, it shall be as sufficient as your bond at all 
times: I carry half a score birds in a cage, shall ever remain at your call. 
Farewell, wits ; farewell, good wits, [Exit. 

Rhod. Farewell, the tx-ue map of a gull: by heaven he shall to th' court! 
'tis the perfect model of an impudent upstart; the compound of a poet and a 
lawyer ; he shall sure to th' court. 

Mvg. Nay, for God's sake, let's have no fools at court. 

Rhod. He shall to 't, that 's certain. The duke had a purpose to dispatch 
some one or other to the French king, to entreat him to send for the body of 
his niece, which the melancholy Earl of St. Anne, her husband, hath kept so 
long unburied, as meaning one grave should entomb himself and her together. 

Mug. A very worthy subject for an embassage, as D' Olive is for an am- 
bassador agent ; and 'tis as suitable to his brain, as his parcel-gilt beaver to his 
fool's head. 

Rhod. Well, it shall go hard, but he shall be employed. Oh, 'tis a most 
accomplished ass; the mongrel of a gull, and a villain : the very essence of his 
soul is pure villany ; the substance of his brain, foolery; one that believes no- 
thing from the stars upward; a pagan in belief, an epicure beyond belief; pro- 
digious in lust ; prodigal in wasteful expense ; in necessary, most penurious. 
His wit is to admire and imitate; his grace is to censure and detract; he shall 
to th' court, i f\\ith he shall thither: I will shape such employment for him, as 
that he himself shall have no less contentment, in making mirth to the whole 
court, than the Duke and the whole court shall have pleasure in enjoying his 
presence. A knave, if he be rich, is fit to make an officer, as a fool, if he be a 
knave, is fit to make an intelligencer. [Kxev.nV* 



ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 69 

His * May-day' is not so good. ' All Fools,' the ' Widow's 
Tears,' and ' Eastward Hoe,' are comedies of great merit, par- 
ticularly the last. The first is borrowed a good deal from Te- 
rence, and the character of Valerio, an accomplished rake, who 
passes with his father for the person of the greatest economy and 
rusticity of manners, is an excellent idea, executed with spirit. 
* Eastward Hoe' w^as written in conjunction with Ben Jonson 
and Marston ; and for his share in it,, on account of some allusions 
to the Scotch, just after the accession of James I., our author, 
with his friends, had nearly lost his ears. Such were the notions 
of poetical justice in those days ! The behaviour of Ben Jonson's 
mother on this occasion is remarkable. " On his release from 
prison, he gave an entertainment to his friends, among whom 
were Camden and Selden. In the midst of the entertainment, 
his mother, more an antique Roman than a Briton, drank to him, 
and showed him a paper of poison, which she intended to have 
given him in his liquor, having first taken a portion of it herself, 
if the sentence for his punishment had been executed." This 
play contains the first idea of Hogarth's ' Idle and Industrious 
ApprenticeSr' 

It remains for me to say something of Webster and Decker. 
For these two writers I do not know how to show my regard and 
admiration sufficiently. Noble-minded Webster, gentle-hearted 
Decker, how may I hope to " express ye unblam'd," and repay 
to your neglected manes some part of the debt of gratitude I owe 
for proud and soothing recollections ? I pass by the ' Appius 
and Virginia' of the former, which is however a good, sensible, 
solid tragedy, cast in a frame-work of the most approved models, 
with little to blame or praise in it, except the aflTecting speech of 
Appius to Virginia just before he kills her ; as well as Decker's 
' Wonder of a Kingdom,' his ' Jacomo Gentili,' that truly ideal 
character of a magnificent patron, and ' Old Fortunatus and 
his Wishing-cap,' which last has the idle garrulity of age, with 
the freshness and gaiety of youth still upon its cheek and in its 
heart. These go into the common catalogue, and are lost in the 
crowd; but Webster's 'Vittoria Corombona' I cannot so soon 
part with ; and old honest Decker's Siguier Orlando Friscobaldo 
I shall never forget ! I became only of late acquainted with 



70 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

this last-mentioned worthy character ; but the bargain between 
us is, I trust, for life. We sometimes regret that we had not 
sooner met with characters like these, that seem to raise, revive, 
and give a new zest to our being. Vain the complaint ! We 
should never have known their value, if we had not known them 
always : they are old, very old acquaintance, or we should not 
recognize them at first sight. We only find in books what is al- 
ready written within "the red-leaved tables of our hearts." 
The pregnant materials are there; "the pangs, the internal 
pangs are ready ; and poor humanity's afflicted will struggling 
in vain with ruthless destiny." But the reading of fine poetry 
may indeed open the bleeding wounds, or pour balm and conso- 
lation into them, or sometimes even close them up for ever ! Let 
any one who has never known cruel disappointment, nor com- 
fortable hopes, read the first scene between Orlando and Hippo- 
lito, in Decker's play of the ' Honest Whore,' and he will see 
nothing in it. But I think few persons will be entirely proof 
against such passages as some of the fol lowing : ■ 

^^ Enter Orlando Friscobaldo. 

Omnes. Signior Friscobaldo. 

Hippolito. Friscobaldo, oh ! pray call him, and leave me ; we two have 
business. 

Carolo. Ho, Signior! Signior Friscobaldo, the Lord Hippolito. 

[Exeunt, 

Orlando. My noble Lord! the Lord Hippolito! The Duke's son! his 
brave daughter's brave husband ! How does your honour'd Lordship 1 Does 
your nobility remember so poor a gentleman as Signior Orlando Friscobaldo 1 
old mad Orlando 1 

Hip. Oh, sir, our friends, they ought to be unto us as our jewels; as 
dearly valued, being locked up and unseen, as when we wear them in our 
hands. I see, Friscobaldo, age hath not command of your blood ; for all 
Time's sickle hath gone over you, you are Orlando still. 

Orl. Why, my Lord, are not the fields mown and cut down, and stript 
bare, and yet wear they not pied coats again '? Though my head be like a 
leek, white, may not my heart be like the blade, green 1 

Hip. Scarce can I read the stories on your brow, 
Which age hath writ there : you look youthful still. 

Orl. I eat snakes, my Lord, I eat snakes. My heart shall never have a 
wrinkle in it so long as I can cry Hem ! with a clear voice. * » * 

Hip. You are the happier man, sir. 

Orl. May not old Friscobaldo, my Lord, be merry now, ha*? I have a 



ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 71 

[ \ • 

little, have all things, have nothing. Thave no wife, I have no child, have no 
chick, and why should I not be in my jocundarel 

Hip. Is your wife then departed 1 

Orl. She's an old dweller in those high countries, yet not from me: here, 
she's here ; a good couple are seldom parted. 

Hip. You had a daughter, too, sir, had you not 7 

Orl. Oh, my Lord! this old tree had one branch, and but one branch, 
growing out of it: it was young, it was fair, it was straight: I pruned it 
daily, drest it carefully, kept it from the wind, helped it to the sun ; yet for all 
my skill in planting, it grew crooked, it bore crabs : I hew'd it down. What's 
become of it I neither know nor care. 

Hip. Then can I tell you what's become of it : that branch is withered. 

Orl. So 'twas long ago. 

Hip. Her name, I think, was Bellafront ; she's dead. 

Orl. Ha! dead'? 

Hip. Yes, what of her was left, not worth the keeping. Even in my sight, 
was thrown into a grave. 

Orl. Dead ! my last and best peace go with her ! I see death's a good 

trencherman ; he can eat coarse homely meat as well as the daintiest Is 

she deadi 

Hip. She's turn'd to earth. 

Orl. Would she were turned to heaven. Umh ! Is she dead 1 I am glad 
the world has lost one of his idols : no whoremonger will at midnight beat at 
the doors : in her grave sleep all my shame and her own ; and all my sorrows, 
and all her sins. 

Hip. I'm glad you are wax, not marble ; you are made 
Of man's best temper; there are now good hopes 
That all these heaps of ice about your heart, 
By which a father's love was frozen up, 
Are thaw'd in those sweet show'rs fetch'd from your eye; 
We are ne'er like angels till our passions die. 
She is not dead, but lives under worse fate ; 
I think she's poor ; and more to clip her wings 
Her husband at this hour lies in the jail, 
For killing of a man : to save his blood. 
Join all your force with mine ; mine shall be shown, 
The getting of his life preserves your own. 

Orl. In my daughter you will say! Does she live,, thenl I am sorry I 
wasted tears upon a harlot ! but the best is, I have a handkerchief to drink 
them up, soap can wash them all out again. Is she poor I 

Hip. Trust me, I think she is. 

Orl. Then she's a right strumpet. I never knew one of their trade rich 
two years together ; sieves can hold no water, nor harlots hoard up money ; 
taverns, tailors, bawds, panders, fiddlers, swaggerers, fools, and knaves, do all 
wait upon a common harlot's trencher ; she is the gallypot to which these 
drones fly: not for love to the pot, but" for the sweet sucket in it, her money, 
her money. 



72 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

t — = 

iRp. I almost dare pawn my word her bosom gives warmth to no such 
snakes ; when did you see her % 

Orl. Not seventeen summers. 

Hip. Is your hate so old 1 

Orl. Older ; it has a white head, and shall never die till she be buried ; her 
wrongs shall be my bedfellow. 

Hip. Work yet his life, since in it lives her fame. 

Oii. No, let him hang, and half her infamy departs out of the world ; I 
hate him for her : he taught her first to taste poison ; I hate her for herself, be- 
cause she refused my physic. 

Hip. Nay, but Friscobaldo. 

Orl. I detest her, I defy both, she's not mine, she's 

Hip. Hear her, but speak. 

Orl. I love no mermaids, I'll not be caught with a quail-pipe. 

Hip. You're now beyond all reason. Is't dotage to relieve your child, 
being poor % 

Orl. ' Tis foolery ; relieve her ! Were her cold limbs stretcht out upon a 
bier, I would not sell this dirt under my nails to buy her an hour's breath, nor 
give this hair unless it were to choke her. 

Hip. Fare you well, for I'D trouble you no more, [Exit. 

Orl. And fare you well, sir, go thy ways ; we have few lords of thy mak- 
ing, that love wenches for their honesty. — 'Las, my girl, art thou poor'? Pov- 
erty dwells next door to despair, there's but a wall between them: despair is 
one of hell's catchpoles, and lest that devil arrest her, I'll to her; yet she shall 
not know me: she shall drink of my wealth as beggars do of running water, 
freely ; yet never know from what fountain's head it flows. Shall a silly bird 
pick her own breast to nourish her young ones : and can a father see his child 
starve 1 That were hard: the pelican does it, and shall not I T' 

The rest of the character is answerable to the beginning. The 
execution is, throughout, as exact as the conception is new and 
masterly. There is the least colour possible used ; the pencil 
drags ; -the canvas is almost seen through : but then, what pre- 
cision of outline, what truth and purity of tone, what firmness of 
hand, what marking of character ! The words and answers all 
along are so true and pertinent, that we seem to see the gestures, 
and to hear the tone with which they are accompanied. So when 
Orlando, disguised, says to his daughter, " You'll ' forgive me," 
and she replies, "I am not marble, I forgive you;" or again, 
when she introduces him to her husband, saying simply, " It is 
my father," there needs no stage-direction to supply the relenting 
tones of voice or cordial frankness of manner with which these 
words are spoken. It is as if there were some fine art to chisel 



ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, DECKER, AND WEBSTER, 73 

thought, and to embody the inmost movements of the mind in 
every-day actions and familiar speech. It has been asked, 

" Oh ! who can paint a sun-beam to the blind, 
Or make him feel a shadow with his mind?" 

But this difficulty is here in a manner overcome. Simplicity and 
extravagance of style, homeliness and quaintness, tragedy and 
comedy, interchangeably set their hands and seals to this admir- 
able production. We find the simplicity of prose with the graces 
of poetry. The stalk grows out of the ground ; but the flowers 
spread their flaunting leaves in the air. The mixture of levity 
in the chief character bespeaks the bitterness from which it seeks 
relief; it is the idle echo of fixed despair, jealous of observation 
or pity. The sarcasm quivers on the lip, while the tear stands 
congealed on the eye-lid. This " tough senior," this impracti- 
cable old gentleman softens into a little child ; this choke-pear 
melts in the mouth like marmalade. In spite of his resolute pro- 
fessions of misanthropy, he watches over his daughter with kindly 
solicitude ; plays the careful housewife ; broods over her lifeless 
hopes ; nurses the decay of her husband's fortune, as he had 
supported her tottering infancy; saves the high-flying Matheo 
from the gallows more than once, and is twice a father to them. 
The story has all the romance of private life, all the pathos of 
bearing up against silent grief, all the tenderness of concealed 
affection : — there is much sorrow patiently borne, and then comes 
peace. Bellafront, in the two parts of this play taken together, 
is a most interesting character. It is an extreme, and I am afraid 
almost an ideal case. She gives the play its title, turns out a 
true penitent, that is, a practical one, and is the model of an ex- 
emplary wife. She seems intended to establish the converse of 
the position, that a reformed rake makes the best husband, the only 
difficulty in proving which, is, I suppose, to meet with the charac- 
ter. The change of her relative position, with regard to Hippolito, 
who, in the first part, in the sanguine enthusiasm of youthful 
generosity, has reclaimed her from vice, and in the second part, 
his own faith and love of virtue having been impaired with the 
progress of years, tries in vain to lure her back again to her 
former follies, has an eflfect the most striking and beautiful. The 
6 



74 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



pleadings on both sides, for and against female faith and con- 
stancy, are managed with great polemical skill, assisted by the 
grace and vividness of poetical illustration. As an instance of 
the manner in which Bellafront speaks of the miseries of her 
former situation, " and she has felt them knowingly," I might 
give the lines in which she contrasts the different regard shown 
to the modest or the abandoned of her sex : 

" I cannot, seeing she's woven of such bad stuff, 

Set colours on a harlot bad enough. 

Nothing did make me when I lov'd them best, 

To loath them more than this : when in the street 

A. fair, young, modest damsel, I did meet, 

She seem'd to all a dove, when I pass'd by 

And I to all a raven : every eye 

That followed her, went with a bashful glance j 

At me each bold and jeering countenance 

Darted forth scorn : to her, as if she had been 

Some tower unvanquished, would they vail ; 

'Gainst me swoln rumour hoisted every sail. 

She crown'd with reverend praises, passed by them ; 

I, though with face mask'd, could not 'scape the hem; 

For, as if heav'n had set strange marks on whores, 

Because they should be pointing-stocks to man, 

Drest up in civilest shape, a courtesan, 

Let her walk saint-like, noteless, and unknown, 

Yet she's betray 'd by some trick of her own." 

Perhaps this sort of appeal to matter of fact and popular opin- 
ion, is more convincing than the scholastic subtleties of the Lady 
in *Comus.' The manner too, in which Infelice, the wife of 
Hippolito, is made acquainted with her husband's infidelity, is 
finely dramatic ; and in the scene where she convicts him of his 
injustice by taxing herself with incontinence first, and then turn- 
ing his most galling reproaches to her into upbraidings against 
his own conduct, she acquits herself with infinite spirit and address. 
The contrivance by which, in the first part, after being supposed 
dead, she is restored to life, and married to Hippolito, though 
perhaps a little far-fetched, is affecting and romantic. There is 
uncommon beauty in the Duke her father's description of her 
sudden illness. In reply to Infelice's declaration on reviving, 
" I'm well," he says, 



ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 75 

" Thou wert not so e'en now. Sickness' pale hand 
Laid hold on thee, ev'n in the midst of feasting: 
And when a cup, crown'd with thy lover's health, 
Had touch'd thy lips, a sensible cold dew 
Stood on thy cheeks, as if that death had wept 
To see such beauty altered." 

Candido, the good-natured man of this play, is a character of 
inconceivable quaintness and simplicity. His patience and good- 
humour cannot be disturbed by anything. The idea (for it is 
nothing but an idea) is a droll one, and is well supported. He is 
not only resigned to injuries, but "turns them," as FalstafT says 
of diseases, " into commodities." He is a patient Grizzel out of 
petticoats, or a Petruchio reversed. He is as determined upon 
winking at affronts, and keeping out of scrapes at all events, as 
the hero of the ' Taming of the Shrew' is bent upon picking 
quarrels out of straws, and signalizing his manhood without the 
smallest provocation to do so. The sudden turn of the character 
of Candido, on his second marriage, is, however, as amusing as 
it is unexpected. 

Matheo, " the high-flying" husband of Bellafront, is a master- 
ly portrait, done with equal ease and effect. He is a person 
almost without virtue or vice, that is, he is in strictness without 
any moral principle at all. He has no malice against others, 
and no concern for himself. He is gay, profligate, and unfeel- 
ing, governed entirely by the impulse of the moment, and utterly 
reckless of consequences. His exclamation, when he gets a new 
suit of velvet, or a lucky run on the dice, " Do we not fly high," 
is an answei* to all arguments. Punishment or advice has no 
more effect upon him, than upon the moth that flies into the 
candle. He is only to be left to his fate. Orlando saves him 
from it, as we do the moth, by snatching it out of the flame, 
throwing it out of the window, and shutting down the casement 
upon it. 

Webster would, I think, be a greater dramatic genius than 
Decker, if he had the same originality ; and perhaps is so, even 
without it. His ' White Devil' and ' Duchess of Malfy,' upon 
the whole, perhaps, come the nearest to Shakspeare of anything 
we have upon record ; the only drawback to them, the only 
shade of imputation than can be thrown upon them, " by which 



76 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

they lose some colour," is, that they are too like Shakspeare, 
and often direct imitations of him, both in general conception 
and individual expression. So far, there is nobody else whom it 
would be either so difficult or so desirable to imitate ; but it 
would have been still better, if all his characters had been en- 
tirely his own, had stood out as much from others, resting only 
on their own naked merits, as that of the honest Hidalgo, on 
whose praises I have dwelt so much above. Decker has, I think, 
more truth of character, more instinctive depth of sentiment, 
more of the unconscious simplicity of nature; but he does 
not, out of his own stores, clothe his subject with the same 
richness of imagination, or the same glowing colours of lan- 
guage. Decker excels in giving expression to habitual, deep- 
ly-rooted feelings, which remain pretty much the same in 
all circumstances, the simple uncompounded elements of na- 
ture and passion : — Webster gives more scope to their various 
combinations and changeable aspects, brings them into dramatic 
play by contrast and comj^arison, flings them into a state of fu- 
sion by a kindled fancy, makes thern describe a wider arc of os- 
cillation from the impulse of unbridled passion, and carries both 
terror and pity to a more painful and sometimes unwarrantable 
excess. Decker is contented with the historic picture of suffer- 
ing ; Webster goes on to suggest horriMe imaginings. The pa- 
thos of the one tells home and for itself; the other adorns his 
sentiments with some image of tender or awful beauty. In a 
word, Decker is more like Chaucer or Boccaccio ; as Webster's 
mind appears to have been cast more in the mould of Shakspeare's, 
as well naturally as from studious emulation. The Bellafront 
and Vittoria Corombona of these two excellent writers, snow their 
different powers and turn of mind. The one is all softness ; the 
other " all fire and air." The faithful wife of Matheo sits at 
home drooping, " like the female dove, the whilst her golden coup- 
lets are disclosed ;" while the insulted and persecuted Victoria 
darts killing scorn and pernicious beauty at her enemies. This 
White Devil (as she is called) is made fair as the leprosy, daz- 
zling as the lightning. She is dressed like a bride in her wrongs 
and her revenge. In the trial scene in particular, her sudden 
indignant answers to the questions that are asked her, startle the 



ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 77 

nearers. Nothing can be imagined finer than the whole conduct 
and conception of this scene, than her scorn of her accusers and 
of herself. The sincerity of her sense of guilt triumphs over the 
hypocrisy of their affected and official contempt for it. In answer 
to the charge of having received letters from the Duke of Bra- 
chiano, she says, 

" Grant I was tempted : — 

Condemn you me, for that the Duke did love me 1 
So may you blame some fair and crystal river, 
For that some melancholic distracted man 
Hath drown'd himself in 't." 

And again, when charged with bemg accessary to her hus- 
band's death, and showing no concern for it — 

" She comes not like a widow ; she comes arm'd 

With scorn and impud^ce. Is this a mourning habit V 

she coolly replies, 

" Had I foreknown his death, as you suggest, 
I would have bespoke my mourning." 

In the closing scene with her cold-blooded assassins, Lodo- 
vico and Gasparo, she speaks daggers, and might almost be sup- 
posed to exorcise the murdering fiend out of these true devils. 
Every word probes to the quick. The whole scene is the sub- 
lime of contempt and indifference. 

" Vittoria. If Florence be i' the Court, he would not kill me. 

Gasparo. Fool ! Princes give rewards with their own hands, 
But death or punishment by the hands of others. 

Lodovlco {to Flamineo). Sirrah, you once did strike me ; I'll strike you 
Unto the centre. 

Flam. Thou 'It do it like a hangman, a base hangman. 
Not like a noble fellow, for thou see'st 
I cannot strike again. 

Lod. Dost laugh 1 

Flam. Would'st have me die, as I was born, in whining 1 

Gasp. Recommend yourself to Heaven. 

Flam. No, I will carry mine own commendations thither. 

Lod. O ! could I kill you forty times a-day. 
And use 't four year together, 'twere too little : 
Nought grieves, but that you are too few to feed 
The famine of our vengeance. What do'st think on ? 



78 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



Flam. Nothing; of nothing: leave thy idle questions — 
I am i' th' way to study a long silence. 
To prate were idle: I reniember nothing; 
There's nothing of so infinite vexation 
As man's own thoughts. 

Lod. O thou glorious strumpet ! 
Could I divide thy breath from this pure air 
When 't leaves thy body, I would suck it up, 
And breathe 't upon some dunghill. 

Vit. Cor. You my death's-man \ 
Methinks thou dost not look horrid enough ; 
Thou hast too good a face to be a hangman : 
If thou be, do thy office in right form ; 
Fall down upon thy knees, and, ask forgiveness, 

Lod. O ! thou hast been a most prodigious comet; 
But I'll cut off your train : kill the Moor first, 

Vii. Cor. You shall not kill her first ; behold my breast ; 
I will be waited on in death : my servajfit 
Shall never go before me. 

Gasp. Are you so brave 1 

Vit. Cor. Yes, I shall welcome death 
As princes do some great embassadours ; 
I'll meet thy weapon half way. 

Lod. Thou dost not tremble ! 
Methinks, fear should dissolve thee into air. 

Vit. Cor. O, thou art deceived, I am too true a woman I 
Conceit can never kill me. I'll tell thee what, 
I will not in my death shed one base tear 
Or if look pale, for want of blood, not fear. 

Gasp, {to Zanche). Thou art my task, black fury. 

Zanche. I have blood 
As red as either of theirs ! Wilt drink some 1 
'Tis good for the falling sickness : I am proud 
Death cannot alter my complexion, 
For I shall ne'er look pale. 

Lod. Strike, strike, 
With a joint motion. 

Vit. Cor. 'Twas a manly blow : 
The next thou givest, murther some sucking infant, 
And then thou wilt be famous." 

Such are some of the terrible graces of the obscure, forgotten 
Webster. There are other parts of this play of a less violent, 
more subdued, and, if it were possible, even deeper character ; 
such is the declaration of divorce pronounced by Brachiano on 
his wife : 



ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 79 

'•Your hand I'll kiss: 
This is the latest ceremony of my love; 
I'll never more live with you," &c. 

which is in the manner of, and equal to, Decker's finest things : 
— and others, in a quite different style of fanciful poetry and be- 
wildered passion ; such as the lamentation of Cornelia, his 
mother, for the death of Marcello, and the parting scene of 
Brachiano ; which would be as fine as Shakspeare, if they were 
not in a great measure borrowed from his inexhaustible store. 
In the former, after Flamineo has stabbed his brother, and Hor- 
tensio comes in, Cornelia exclaims, 

"Alas ! he is not dead ; he's in a trance. 
Why, here's nobody shall get anything by his death : 
Let me call him again, for God's sake. 

Hor. I would you were deceived. 

Corn. O you abuse me, you abuse me, you abuse me ! How many have 
gone away thus, for lack of 'tendance 1 Rear up 's head, rear up 's head ; his 
bleeding inward will kill him. 

Hor. You see he is departed. 

Corn. Let me come to him ; give me him as he is. If he be turned to 
earth, let me but give him one hearty kiss, and you shall put us both into one 
coffin. Fetch a looking-glass : see if his breath will not stain it ; or pull out 
some feathers from my pillow, and lay them to his lips. Will you lose him 
for a little pains-taking? 

Hor. Your kindest office is to pray for him. 

Corn. Alas ! I would not pray for him yet. He may live to lay me i' th' 
ground, and pray for me, if you'll let me come to him. 

£Jn<cr Brachiano, all arraed, save the Bearer^ with Flamineo and Page. 

Brack, Was this your handy- work 1 

Flam. It was my misfortune. 

Corn. He lies, he lies ; he did not kill him. These have killed him, that 
would not let him be better looked to. 

Brack. Have comfort, my grieved mother. 

Corn. O, yon screech-owl ! 

Hor. Forbear, good madame. 

Com. Let me go, let me go. 

{Site runs to Flamineo vntk her knife drawn, and coming 
to kirn, lets it fall.) 
The God of Heaven forgive thee ! Dost not wonder 
I pray for thee'? I'll tell thee what's the reason : 
I have scarce breath to number twenty minutes ; 
I'd not spend that in cursing. Fare thee well ! 



80 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

Half of thyself lies there; and may'st thou live 
To fill an hour-glass with his moulder'd ashes, 
To (ell how thou should'st spend the time to come 
In blest repentance. 

Brack. Mother, pray tell me, 
How came he by his death 1 What was the quarrel 1 

Corn. Indeed, my younger boy presumed too much 
Upon his manhood, gave him bitter words, 
Drew his sword first ; and so, I know not how, 
For I was out of my wits, he fell with 's head 
Just in my bosom. 

Page. This is not true, madam. 

Corn. I pr'ythee, peace. 
One arrow's graz'd already: it were vain 
To lose this ; for that will ne'er be found again." 

This is a good deal borrowed from Lear ; but the inmost folds 
of the human heart, the sudden turns and windings of the fondest 
affection, are also laid open with so masterly and original a hand, 
that it seems to prove the occasional imitations as unnecessary as 
they are evident. The scene where the Duke discovers that he 
is poisoned, is as follows, and equally fine: 

" Brack. Oh ! I am gone already. The infection 
Flies to the brain and heart. O, thou strong heart, 
There's such a covenant 'tween the world and thee, 
They're loth to part. 

Giovanni. O my most lov'd father ! 

Brack. Remove the boy away : 
Where's this good woman 1 Had I infinite worlds, 
They were too little for thee. Must I leave thee 1 {To Vittoria.) 
What say you, screech-owls 1 {To Ike Physicians.') Is the venom mortal 1 

Pky. Most deadly. 

Brack. Most corrupted politic hangman I 
You kill without book ; but your art to save 
Fails you as oft as great men's needy friends: 
I that have given life to offending slaves, 
And wretched murderers, have I not power 
To lengthen mine own a twelve-month 1 
Do not kiss me, for I shall poison thee. 
This unction is sent from the great Duke of Florence. 

Francesco de Medici {in disguise). Sir, be of comfort. 

Brack. O thou soft natural death ! that art joint-twin 
To sweetest slumber ! — no rough-bearded comet 
Stares on thy mild departure : the dull owl 



ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 81 

Beats not against thy casement: the hoarse wolf 
Scents not thy carrion. Pity winds thy corse, 
Whilst horror waits on princes. 

Vit. Cor. I am lost for ever. 

Brack. How miserable a thing it is to die 
'Mongst women howling ! What are those 1 

Flam. Franciscans. 
They have brought the extreme unction. 

Brack. On pain of death, let no man name death to me : 
It is a word most infinitely terrible. 
Withdraw into our cabinet." 

The deception practised upon him by Lodovico and Gasparo, 
who offer him the sacrament in the disguise of Monks, and then 
discover themselves to damn him, is truly diabolical and ghastly. 
But the genius that suggested it was as profound as it was lofty. 
When they are at first introduced, Flamineo says, 

" See, see how firmly he doth fix his eye 
Upon the Crucifix." 

To which Vittoria answers, 

"Oh, hold it constant: 
It settles his wild spirits ; and so his eyes 
Melt into tears." 

The Dutchess of Malfy is not, in my judgment, quite so 
spirited or effectual a performance as the White Devil. But it 
is distinguished by the same kind of beauties, clad in the same 
terrors. I do not know but the occasional strokes of passion are 
even profounder and more Shakspearian ; but the story is more 
laboured, and the horror is accumulated to an overpowering and 
insupportable height. However appalling to the imagination and 
finely done, the scenes of the madhouse to which the Duchess is . 
condemned with a view to unsettle her reason, and the interview 
between her and her brother, where he gives her the supposed 
dead hand of her husband, exceed, to my thinking, the just 
bounds of poetry and of tragedy. At least, the merit is of a 
kind which, however great, we wish to be rare. A series of 
such exhibitions obtruded upon the senses or the imagination 
must tend to stupefy and harden, rather than to exalt the fancy 



THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



or meliorate the heart. I speak this under correction ; but I 
hope the objection is a venial common-place. In a different style 
altogether are the directions she gives about her children in her 
last struggles : 

" I pr'ythee, look thou giv'st my little boy 
Some syrop for his cold, and let the girl 
Say her pray'rs ere she sleep. Now what death you please — " 

and her last word, " Mercy," which she recovers just strength 
enough to pronounce ; her proud answer to her tormentors, who 
taunt her with her degradation and misery — " But I am Duchess 
of Malfy still"* — as if the heart rose up, like a serpent coiled, 
to resent the indignities put upon it, and being struck at, struck 
again ; and the staggering reflection her brother makes on her 
death, " Cover her face : my eyes dazzle : she died young !" 
Bosola replies : 

" I think not so ; her infelicity 
Seem'd to have years too many. 

Ferdinand. She and I were twins : 
And should I die this instant, I had liv'd 
Her time to a minute." 

This is not the bandying of idle words and rhetorical common- 
places, but the writhing and conflict, and the sublime colloquy 
of man's nature with itself! 

The ' Revenger's Tragedy,' by Cyril Tourneur, is the only 
other drama equal to these and to Shakspeare, in " the dazzling 
fence of impassioned argument," in pregnant illustration, and in 
those profound reaches of thought which lay open the soul of 
feeling. The play, on the whole, does not answer to the expec- 
tations it excites ; but the appeals of Castiza to her mother, who 
endeavours to corrupt her virtuous resolutions, " Mother, come 

* " Am I not the Duchess 1 

' Bosola. Thou art some great woman, sure ; for riot begins to sit on thy 
forehead (clad in grey hairs) twenty years sooner than on a merry milkmaid's. 
Thou sleep'st worse than if a mouse should be forced to take up his lodging 
in a cat's ear : a little infant that breeds its teeth, should it lie with thee, would 
cry out, as if thou wert the more unquiet bed-fellow. 
DticL I am Duchess of Malfy still." 



ON MARSTON, CHAPMAN, DECKER, AND WEBSTER. 83 

from that poisonous woman there," with others of the like kind, 
are of as high and abstracted an essence of poetry, as any of 
those above mentioned. 

In short, the great characteristic of the elder dramatic writers 
is, that there is nothing theatrical about them. In reading them 
you only think how the persons, into whose mouths certain sen- 
timents are put, would have spoken or looked : in reading Dry- 
den and others of that school, you only think, as the authors 
themselves seem to have done, how they would be ranted on the 
stage by some buskined hero or tragedy-queen. In this respect, 
indeed, some of his more obscure contemporaries have the ad- 
vantage over Shakspeare himself, inasmuch as we have never 
seen their works represented on the stage ; and there is no stage- 
trick to remind us of it. The characters of their heroes have 
not been cut down to fit into the prompt-book, nor have we ever 
seen their names flaring in the play-bills in small or large capi- 
tals. — I do not mean to speak disrespectfully of the stage ; but I 
think higher still of nature, and next to that of books. They 
are the nearest to our thoughts : they wind into the heart ; the 
poet's verse slides into the current of our blood. We read them 
when young, we remember them when old. We read there of 
what has happened to others ; we feel that it has happened to 
ourselves. They are to be had everywhere cheap and good. 
We breathe but the air of books : we owe everything to their 
authors, on this side barbarism ; and we pay them easily with 
contempt, while living, and with an epitaph, when dead ! Mi- 
chael Angelo is beyond the Alps; Mrs. Siddo-ns has left the 
stage and us to mourn her loss. Were it not so, there are 
neither picture-galleries nor theatres- royal on Salisbury-plain, 
where I write this ; but here, even here, with a few old apthors, 
I can manage to get through the summer or the winter months, 
without ever knowing what it is to feel ennui. They sit with me 
at breakfast ; they walk out with me before dinner. After a 
long walk through unfrequented tracts, after starting the hare 
from the fern, or hearing the wing of the raven rustling above 
my head, or being greeted by the woodman's " stern good-night," 
as he strikes into his narrow homeward path, I can " take mine 
ease at mine inn," beside the blazing hearth, and shake hands 



84 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

with Signor Orlando Friscobaldo, as the oldest acquaintance I 
have. Ben Jonson, learned Chapman, Master Webster, and 
Master Heywood, are there ; and seated round, discourse the 
silent hours away. Shakspeare is there himself, not in Gibber's 
manager's coat. Spenser is hardly yet returned from a ramble 
through the woods, or is concealed behind a group of nymphs, 
fawns, and satyrs. Milton lies on the table, as on an altar, never 
taken up or laid down without reverence. Lyly's Endymion 
sleeps with the Moon, that shines in at the window ; and a breath 
of wind stirring at a distance seems a sigh from the tree under 
which he grew old. Faustus disputes in one corner of the room 
with fiendish faces, and reasons of divine astrology. Bellafront 
soothes Matheo, Vittoria triumphs over her judges, and old 
Chapman repeats one of the hymns of Homer, in his own 
fine translation ! I should have no objection to pass my life in 
this manner out of the world, not thinking of it, nor it of me ; 
neither abused by my enemies, nor defended by my friends; 
careless of the future, but sometimes dreaming of the past, 
which might as well be forgotten ! Mr. Wordsworth has ex- 
pressed this sentiment well (perhaps I have borrowed it from 
him) — 

" Books, dreams, are both a world ; and books, we know, 
Are a substantial world, both pure and good. 
Round which, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, 
Our pastime and our happiness may grow. 

****** 

Two let me mention dearer than the rest. 

The gentle lady wedded to the Moor, 

And heavenly Una with her milk-white lamb. 

Blessings be with them and eternal praise, 
The poets, who on earth have made us heirs 
Of ti-uth and pure delight in deathless lays. 
Oh, might my name be number'd among theirs, 
Then gladly would I end my mortal days !" 

I have no sort of pretension to join in the concluding wish of 
the last stanza ; but I trust the writer feels that this aspiration 
of his early and highest ambition is already not unfulfilled ! 



ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, ETC. 



LECTURE IV. 

On Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Ford, and Massinger. 

Beaumont and Fletcher, with all their prodigious merits, appear 
to me the first writers who in some measure departed from the 
genuine tragic style of the age of Shakspeare. They thought 
less of their subject, and more of themselves, than some others. 
They had a great and unquestioned command over the stores 
both of fancy and passion ; but they availed themselves too 
often of common-place extravagances and theatrical trick. Men 
at first produce effect by studying nature, and afterwards they 
look at nature only to produce effect. It is the same in the his- 
tory of other arts, and of other periods of literature. With re- 
spect to most of the writers of this age, their subject was their 
master. Shakspeare was alone, as I have said before, master 
of his subject ; but Beaumont and Fletcher were the first who 
made a play-thing of it, or a convenient vehicle for the display 
of their own powers. The example of preceding or contempo- 
rary writers had given them facility ; the frequency of dramatic 
exhibition had advanced the popular taste ; and this facility of 
production, and the necessity for appealing to popular applause, 
tended to vitiate their own taste, and to make them willing to 
pamper that of the public for novelty and extraordinary effect. 
There wants something of the sincerity and modesty of the 
older writers. They do not wait nature's time, or work out her 
materials patiently and faithfully, but try to anticipate her, and 
so far defeat themselves. They would have a catastrophe in 
every scene ; so that you have none at last : they would raise 
admiration to its height in every line ; so that the impression of 
the whole is comparatively loose and desultory. They pitch 
the characters at first in too high a key, and exhaust themselves 
by the eagerness and impatience of their efforts. We find all 
the prodigality of youth, the confidence inspired by success, an 
enthusiasm bordering on extravagance, richness running riot, 



8G THE AGE OP ELIZABETH. 



beauty dissolving in its own sweetness. They are like heirs 
just come to their estates, like lovers in the honey-moon. In the 
economy of nature's gifts they " misuse the bounteous Pan, and 
thank the Gods amiss." Their productions shoot up in haste, 
but bear the marks of precocity and premature decay. Or they 
are two goodly trees, the stateliest of the forest, crowned with 
blossoms, and with the verdure springing at their feet ; but they 
do not strike their roots far enough into the ground, and the fruit 
can hardly ripen for the flowers ! 

It cannot be denied that they are lyrical and descriptive 
poets of the highest order ; every page of their writings is a 
jlorilegium : they are dramatic poets of the second class, in point 
of knowledge, variety, vivacity, and effect ; there is hardly a 
passion, character, or situation, which they have not touched in 
their devious range, and whatever they touched they adorned 
with some new grace or striking feature : they are masters of 
style and versification in almost every variety of melting modu- 
lation or sounding pomp, of which they are capable : in comic 
wit and spirit, they are scarcely surpassed by any writers of 
any age. There they are in their element, " like eagles newly 
baited ;" but I speak rather of their serious poetry; and this, 1 
apprehend, with all its richness, sweetness, loftiness, and grace, 
wants something — stimulates more than it gratifies, and leaves 
the mind in a certain sense exhausted and unsatisfied. Their 
fault is a too ostentatious and indiscriminate display of power. 
Everything seems in a state of fermentation and efiervescence, 
and not to have settled and found its centre in their minds. The 
ornaments, through neglect or abundance, do not always appear 
sufficiently appropriate : there is evidently a rich wardrobe of 
words and images, to set off any sentiments that occur, but not 
equal felicity in the choice of the sentiments to be expressed ; 
the characters in general do not take a substantial form, or excite 
a growing interest, or leave a permanent impression ; the passion 
does not accumulate by the force of time, of circumstances, and ha- 
bit, but wastes itself in the first ebullitions of surprise and novelty. 

Besides these more critical objections, there is a too frequent 
mixture of voluptuous softness or effeminacy of character with 
horror in the subjects, a conscious weakness (I can hardly think 



ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, BEN JONSON, ETC. 87 

it wantonness) of moral constitution struggling with wilful and 
violent situations, like the tender wings of the moth, attracted 
to the flame that dazzles and consumes it. In the hey-day of 
their youthful ardour, and the intoxication of their animal spirits, 
they take a perverse delight in tearing up some rooted sentiment, 
to make a mawkish lamentation over it ; and fondly and gratui- 
tously cast the seeds of crimes into forbidden grounds, to see how 
they will shoot up and vegetate into luxuriance, to catch the eye 
of fancy. They are not safe teachers of morality : they tamper 
with it, like an experiment tried in corpore vili ; and seem to re- 
gard the decomposition of the common affections, and the disso- 
lution of the strict bonds of society, as an agreeable study and a 
careless pastime. The tone of Shakspeare's writings is manly 
and bracing ; theirs is at once insipid and meretricious, in the 
comparison. Shakspeare never disturbs the grounds of moral 
principle; but leaves his characters (after doing them heaped 
justice on all sides) to be judged of by our common sense and 
natural feeling. Beaumont and Fletcher constantly bring in 
equivocal sentiments and characters, as if to set them up to be 
debated by sophistical casuistry, or varnished over with the colours 
of poetical ingenuity. Or Shakspeare may be said to " cast the 
diseases of the mind, only to restore it to a sound and pristine 
health:" the dramatic paradoxes of Beaumont and Fletcher are, 
to all appearance, tinctured with an infusion of personal vanity 
and laxity of principle. I do not say that this was the character 
of the men ; but it strikes me as the character of their minds. 
The two things are very distinct. The greatest purits (hypo- 
crisy apart) are often free livers; and some of the most 
unguarded professors of a general licence of behaviour, 
have been the last persons to take the benefit of their own doc- 
trine, from which they reap nothing, but the obloquy, and the 
pleasure of startling their " wonder- wounded" hearers. There 
is a division of labour, even in vice. Some persons addict them- 
selves to the speculation only, others to the practice. The peccant 
humours of the body or the mind break out in different ways. 
One man sows his wild oats in his neighbour's field : another on 
Mount Parnassus ; from whence, borne on the breath of fame, 
they may hope to spread and fructify to distant times and re- 



THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



gions. Of the latter class were our poets, who, I believe, led 
unexceptionable lives, and only indulged their imaginations in 
occasional unwarrantable liberties with the Muses. "What makes 
them more inexcusable, and confirms this charge against them, 
is, that they are always abusing " wanton poets," as if willing 
to shift suspicion from themselves. 

Beaumont and Fletcher were the first, also, who laid the 
foundation of the artificial diction and tinselled pomp of the next 
generation of poets, by aiming at a profusion of ambitious orna- 
ments, and by translating the commonest circumstances into the 
language of metaphor and passion. It is this misplaced and in- 
ordinate craving after striking effect and continual excitement 
that had at one time rendered our poetry the most vapid of all 
things, by not leaving the moulds of poetic diction to be filled up 
by the overflowings of nature and passion, but by swelling out 
ordinary and unmeaning topics to certain preconceived and in- 
dispensable standards of poetical elevation and grandeur. — I 
shall endeavour to confirm this praise, mixed with unwilling 
blame, by remarking on a few of their principal tragedies. If 
I have done them injustice, the resplendent passages I have to 
quote will set everything to rights. 

The ' Maid's Tragedy' is one of the poorest. The nature of 
the distress is of the most disagreeable and repulsive kind ; and 
not the less so because it is entirely improbable and uncalled for. 
There is no sort of reason, or no sufficient reason to the reader's 
mind, why the king should marry off his mistress to one of his 
courtiers, why he should pitch upon the worthiest for this pur- 
pose, why he should, by such a choice, break off Amintor's 
match with the sister of another principal support of his throne 
(whose death is the consequence), why he should insist on the 
inviolable fidelity of his former mistress to him after she is mar- 
ried, and why her husband should thus inevitably be made ac- 
quainted with his dishonour, and roused to madness and revenge, 
except the mere love of mischief and gratuitous delight in tor- 
turing the feelings of others, and tempting one's own fate. The 
character of Evadne, however, her naked, unblushing impu- 
dence, the mixture of folly with vice, her utter insensibility to 
any motive but her own pride and inclination, her heroic su- 



ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, BEN JONSON, ETC. 89 

periority to any signs of shame or scruples of conscience from a 
recollection of what is due to herself or others, are well described, 
and the lady is true to herself in her repentance, which is owing 
to nothing but the accidental impulse and whim of the moment. 
The deliberate, voluntary disregard of all moral ties and all 
pretence to virtue, in the structure of the fable, is nearly unac- 
countable. Amintor (who is meant to be the hero of the piece) 
is a feeble, irresolute character : his slavish, recanting loyalty to 
his prince, who has betrayed and dishonoured him, is of a piece 
with the tyranny and insolence of which he is made the sport ; 
and even his tardy revenge is snatched from his hands, and he 
kills his former betrothed and beloved mistress, instead of exe- 
cuting vengeance on the man who has destroyed his peace of 
mind and unsettled her intellects. The king, however, meets 
his fate from the penitent fury of Evadne ; and on this account, 
the ' Maid's Tragedy' was forbidden to be acted in the reign of 
Charles II., as countenancing the doctrine ot' regicide. Aspatia 
is a beautiful sketch of resigned and heart-broken melancholy ; 
and Calianax, a blunt, satirical courtier, is a character of much 
humour and novelty. There are striking passages here and 
there, but fewer than in almost any of their plays. Amintor's 
speech to Evadne, when she makes confession of her unlocked- 
for remorse, is, I think, the rinesf : 



" Do not mock me : 



Though I am tame, and bred up with my wrongs, 
Which are my foster-brothers, I may leap. 
Like a hand- wolf, into my natural wildness, 
And do an outrage. Prithee, do not mock me !" 

« King and No King,' which is on a strangely chosen subject 
as strangely treated, is very superior in power and effect. There 
is an unexpected reservation in the plot, which, in some measure, 
relieves the painfulness of the impression. Arbaces is painted 
in gorgeous, but not alluring colours. His vain-glorious pre- 
tensions and impatience of contradiction are admirably displayed, 
and are so managed as to produce an involuntary comic effect 
to temper the lofty tone of tragedy, particularly in the scenes in 
which he affects to treat his vanquished enemy with such con- 
7 



90 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



descending kindness ; and perhaps this display of upstart pride 
was meant by the authors as an oblique satire on his low origin, 
which is afterwards discovered. His pride of self will and fierce 
impetuosity are the same in war and in love. The haughty 
voluptuousness and pampered effeminacy of his character admit 
neither respect for his misfortunes, nor pity for his errors. His 
ambition is a fever in the blood ; and his love is a sudden trans- 
port of ungovernable caprice that brooks no restraint, and is in- 
toxicated with the lust of power, even in the lap of pleasure, and 
the sanctuary of the affections. The passion of Panthea is, as 
it were, a reflection from, and lighted at the shrine of her lover's 
flagrant vanity. In the elevation of his rank, and in the con- 
sciousness of his personal accomplishments, he seems firmly 
persuaded (and by sympathy to persuade others) that there is 
nothing in the world which can be an object of liking or admira- 
tion but himself. The first birth and declaration of this perverted 
sentiment to himself, when he meets with Panthea after his return 
from conquest, fostered by his presumptuous infatuation and the 
heat of his inflammable passions, and the fierce and lordly tone 
in which he repels the suggestion of the natural obstacles to his 
sudden phrenzy, are in Beaumont and Fletcher's most daring 
manner ; but the rest is not equal. What may be called the 
love scenes are equally gross and common-place ; and instead 
of any thing like delicacy or a struggle of different feelings, 
iliave all the indecency and familiarity of a brothel. Bessus, a 
comic character in this play, is a swaggering coward, something 
between Parolles and Falstaff. 

The ' False One' is an indirect imitation of Antony and Cleo- 
patra. We have Septimius for (Enobarbus, and Caesar for 
Antony. Cleopatra herself is represented in her girlish state, 
but she is made divine in 

" Youth that opens like perpetual spring," 

and promises the rich harvest of love and pleasure that succeeds 
it. Her first presenting herself before Csesar, when she is brought 
in by Sceva, and the impression she makes upon him, like a 
vision dropped from the clouds, or 

" like some celestial sweetness, the treasure of soft love," 



ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, BEN JONSON, ETC. 91 

are exquisitely conceived. Photinus is an accomplished villain, 
well-read in crooked policy and quirks of state ; and the descrip- 
tion of Pompey has a solemnity and grandeur worthy of his un- 
fortunate end. Septimius says, bringing in his lifeless head, 

^ " 'Tis here, 'tis done ! Behold, you fearful viewers, 

Shake, and behold the model of the world here, 
The pride and strength ! Look, look again, 'tis finished! 
That that whole arniies, nay, whole nations. 
Many and mighty kings, have been struck blind at, 
And fled before, wing'd with their fears and terrors, 
That steel War waited on, and fortune courted, 
That high-plum'd Honour built up for her own j 
Behold that mightiness, behold that fierceness, 
Behold that child of war, with all his glories, 
By this poor hand made breathless J" 

And again Caesar says of him, who was his mortal enemy (it 
was not held in the fashion in those days, nor will it be held so 
in time to come, to lampoon those whom you have vanquished) — 

" Oh, thou conqueror, 



Thou glory of the world once, now the pity, 

Thou awe of nations, wherefore didst thou fall thus 1 

What poor fate followed thee, and plucked thee on 

To trust thy sacred life to an Egyptian 1 

The life and light of Rome to a blind stranger, 

That honourable war ne'er taught a nobleness. 

Nor worthy circumstance show'd what a man was 1 

That never heard thy name sung but in banquets. 

And loose lascivious pleasures 1 — to a boy. 

That had no faith to comprehend thy greatness, 

No study of thy life to know thy goodness 1 

Egyptians, do you think your highest pyramids, 

Built to outdure the sun, as you suppose, 

Where your unworthy kings lie raked in ashes, 

Are monuments fit for him ! No, brood of Nilus, 

Nothing can cover his high fame but heaven; 

No pyramids set off his memories. 

But the eternal substance of his greatness, 

To which I leave him." 

It is something worth living for, to write or even read such 
poetry as this is, or to know that it has been written, or that there 
have been subjects on which to write it ! — This, of all Beaumont 



93 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



and Fletcher's plays, comes the nearest in style and manner to 
Shakspeare, not excepting the first act of the ' Two Noble Kins- 
men,' which has been sometimes attributed to him. 

The ' Faithful Shepherdess,' by Fletcher alone, is " a per- 
petual feast of nectar'd sweets, where no crude surfeit reigns." 
The author has in it given a loose to his fancy, and his fancy 
was his most delightful and genial quality, where, to use his own 
words, 

" He takes most ease, and grows ambitious 
Thro' his own wanton fire and pride delicious." 

The songs and lyrical descriptions throughout are luxuriant 
and delicate in a high degree. He came near to Spenser in a 
certain tender and voluptuous sense of natural beauty ; he came 
near to Shakspeare in the playful and fantastic expression of it. 
The whole composition is an exquisite union of dramatic and 
pastoral poetry ; where the local descriptions receive a tincture 
from the sentiments and purposes of the speaker, and each char- 
acter, cradled in the lap of nature, paints ''her\irgin fancies 
wild" with romantic grace and classic elegance. 

The place and its employments are thus described by Chloe 
to Thenot : 



" Here be woods as green 



As any, air likewise as fresh and sweet 
As where smooth Zephyrus plays on the fleet 
Face of the curled stream, with flow'rs as many 
As the young spring gives, and as choice as any ; 
Here be all new delights, cool streams and wells, 
Arbours o'ergrown with woodbine ; caves, and dells ; 
Chuse where thou wilt, while I sit by and sing, 
Or gather rushes, to make many a ring 
For thy long fingers ; tell thee tales of love, 
How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove. 
First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes 
She took eternal fire that never dies ; 
How she conveyed him softly in a sleep, 
His temples bound with poppy, to the steep 
Head of old Latmos, where she stoops each night, 
Gilding the mountain with her brother's light, 
To kiss her sweetest." 



ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, BEN JONSON, ETC. 93 

There are few things that can surpass in truth and beauty of 
allegorical description the invocation of Amaryllis to the God of 
Shepherds, Pan, to save her from the violence of the Sullen 
Shepherd, for Syrinx's sake : 



" For her dear sake, 



That loves the rivers' brinks, and still doth shake 
In cold remembrance of thy quick pursuit !" 

Or again, the friendly Satyr promises Clorin — 

" Brightest, if there be remaining t 

Any service, without feigning 

I will do it ; were I set 

To catch the nimble wind, or get 

Shadows gliding on the green." 

It would be a task no less difficult than this, to follow the flight 
of the poet's Muse, or catch her fleeting graces, fluttering her 
golden wings, and singing in notes angelical of youth, of love, 
and joy ! 

There is only one aflected and ridiculous character in this 
drama, that of Thenot in love with Clorin. He is attached to 
her for her inviolable fidelity to her buried husband, and wishes 
her not to grant his suit, lest it should put an end to his passion. 
Thus he pleads to her against himself : — 

'* If you yield, I die 

To all affection ; 'tis that loyalty 
You tie unto this grave I so admire ; 
And yet there's something else I would desire, 
If you would hear me, but withal deny. 
Oh Pan, what an uncertain destiny 
Hangs over all my hopes ! I will retire ; 
For if I longer stay, this double fire 
Will lick my life up." 

This is paltry quibbling. It is spurious logic, not genuine 
feeling. A pedant may hang his affections on the point of a 
dilemma in this manner ; but nature does not sophisticate ; or 
when she does, it is to gain her ends, not to defeat them. 

The Sullen Shepherd turns out too dark a character in the 



94 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



end, and gives a shock to the gentle and pleasing sentiments in- 
spired throughout. 

The resemblance of Comus to this poem is not so great as has 
been sometimes contended, nor are the particular allusions im- 
portant or frequent. Whatever Milton copied, he made his own. 
In reading the Faithful Shepherdess, we find ourselves breathing 
the moonlight air under the cope of heaven, and wander by- 
forest side or fountain, among fresh dews and flowers, following 
our vagrant fancies, or smit with the love of nature's works. 
In reading Milton's Comus, and most of his other works, we seem 
t(f be entering a lofty dome raised over our heads and ascending 
to the skies, and as if Nature and everything in it were but a 
temple and an image consecrated by the poet's art to the worship 
of virtue and true religion. The speech of Clorin, after she has 
been alarmed by the Satyr, is the only one of which Milton has 
made a free use : 

" And all my fears go with thee. 

What greatness or what private hidden power 

Is there in me to draw submission 

From this rude man and beast 1 Sure I am mortal : 

The daughter of a shepherd ; he was mortal 

And she that bore me mortal ; prick my hand, 

And it will bleed, a fever shakes me, and 

The self-same wind that makes the young lamb shrink, 

Makes me a-cold : my fear says, I am mortal. 

Yet I have heard (my mother told it me, 

And now I do believe it,) if I keep 

My virgin flow'r uncropt, pure, chaste, and fair. 

No goblin, wood-god, fairy, elf, or fiend, 

Satyr, or other power that haunts the groves, 

Shall hurt my body, or by vain illusion 

Draw me to wander after idle fires ; 

Or voices calling me in dead of night 

To make me follow, and so tole me on 

Thro' mire and standing pools to find my ruin ; 

Else, why should this rough thing, who never knew 

Manners, nor smooth humanity, whose heats 

Are rougher than himself, and more misshapen, 

Thus mildly kneel to me 1 Sure there's a pow'r 

In that great name of Virgin, that binds fast 

All rude uncivil bloods, all appetites 

That break their confines : then, strong Chastity ! 



ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, BEN JONSON, ETC. 95 

Be thou my strongest guard, for here I'll dwell 
In opposition against fate and hell !" 

Ben Jonson's ' Sad Shepherd' comes nearer it in style and 
spirit, but still with essential differences, like the two men, and 
without any appearance of obligation. Ben's is more homely 
and grotesque. Fletcher's is more visionary and fantastical. I 
hardly know which to prefer. If Fletcher has the advantage in 
general power and sentiment, Jonson is superior in naivete and 
truth of local colouring. 

The ' Two Noble Kinsmen' is another monument of Fletcher's 
genius ; and it is said also of Shakspeare's. The style of the 
first act has certainly more weight, more abruptness, and more 
involution, than the general style of Fletcher, with fewer soften- 
ings and fillings-up to sheathe the rough projecting points and 
piece the disjointed fragments together. For example, the com- 
pliment of Theseus to one of the Queens, that Hercules 

" Tumbled him down upon his Nemean hide 
And swore his sinews thaw'd" 

at sight of her beauty, is in a bolder and more masculine vein 
than Fletcher usually aimed at. Again, the supplicating address 
of the distressed Queen to Hippolita, 

" Lend us a knee : 

But touch the ground for us no longer time 

Than a dove's motion, when the head's pluck'd off' — 

is certainly in the manner of Shakspeare, with his subtlety and 
strength of illustration. But, on the other hand, in what imme- 
diately follows, relating to their husbands left dead in the field 
of battle, 

« Tell him if he i' th' blood-siz'd field lay swoln, 
Show'ing the sun his teeth, grinning at the moon, 
What you would do," — 

I think we perceive the extravagance of Beaumont and Fletcher, 
not contented with truth or strength of description, but hurried 
away by the love of violent excitement into an image of disgust 



96 THE AGE OF ELIZABBTH. 

and horror, not called for, and not at all proper in the mouth into 
which it is put. There is a studied exaggeration of the senti- 
ment, and an evident imitation of the parenthetical interruptions 
and breaks in the line, corresponding to what we sometimes meet 
in Shakspeare, as in the speeches of Leontes in ' The Winter's 
Tale ;' but the sentiment is overdone, and the style merely- 
mechanical. Thus Hippolita declares, on her lord's going to the 
wars, 

" We have been soldiers, and we cannot weep, 
When our friends don their helms, or put to sea, 
Or tell of babes broach'd on the lance, or women 
That have seethed their infants in (and after eat them) 
The brine they wept at kiUing 'em ; then if 
You stay to see of us such spinsters, we 
Should hold you here for ever." 

One might apply to this sort of poetry what Marvel says of 
some sort of passions, that it is 

" Tearing our pleasures with rough strife 
Through the iron gates of life." 

It is not in the true spirit of Shakspeare, who was " born only 
heir to all humanity," whose horrors were not gratuitous, and 
who did not harrow up the feelings for the sake of making mere 
bravura speeches. There are also in this first act several repe- 
titions of Shakspeare's phraseology ; a thing that seldom or never 
occurs in his own works. For instance : 

*' Past slightly 

His careless executioTi" — 

" The very lees of such, millions of rates 
Exceed the loine of others" — 

" Let the event, 
That never-erring arbitrator, tell us" — 

" Like old importmenfs bastard.''^ 

There are also words that are never used by Shakspeare in a 
similar sense : — 

" All our surgeons 

Convent in their behoof" — 

" We convent nought else but woes.'* 



ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, BEN JONSON, ETC. 97 

In short, it appears to me that the first part of this play was 
written in imitation of Shakspeare's manner, but I see no reason 
to suppose that it was his, but the common tradition, which is by- 
no means well established. The subsequent acts are confessedly 
Fletcher's, and the imitations of Shakspeare which occur there 
(not of Shakspeare's manner as differing from his, but as it was 
congenial to his own spirit and feeling of nature) are glorious in 
themselves, and exalt our idea of the great original which could 
give birth to such magnificent conceptions in another. The con- 
versation of Palamon and Arcite in prison is of this description 
— the outline is evidently taken from that of Guiderius, Arvira- 
gus, and Bellarius, in ' Cymbelline,' but filled up with a rich pro- 
fusion of graces that make it his own again. 

" Pal. How do you, noble cousin 1 

Arc. How do you, Sir '? 

Pal. Why, strong enough to laugh at misery, 
And bear the chance of war yet. We ai-e prisoners, 
I fear for ever, cousin. 

Arc. I believe it ; 
And to that destiny have patiently 
Laid up my hour to come. 

Pal. Oh, cousin Arcite, 
Where is Thebes now '? Where is our noble country 1 
Where are our friends and kindreds '? Never more 
Must we behold those comforts ; never see 
The hardy youths strive for the games of honour, 
Hung with the painted favours of their ladies, 
Like tall ships under sail: then start amongst 'em, 
And, as an east wind, leave 'em all behind us 
Like lazy clouds, whilst Palamon and Arcite 
Even in the wagging of a wanton leg, 
Outstript the people's praises, won the garland. 
Ere they have time to wish 'em ours. Oh, never 
Shall we two exercise, like twins of honour. 
Our arms again, and feel our fiery horses. 
Like proud seas, under us ! Our good swords now 
(Better the red-eyed god of war ne'er wore) 
Ravish'd our sides, like age, must run to rust. 
And deck the temples of those gods that hate us : 
These hands shall never draw 'em out like lightning, 
To blast whole armies more. 

Arc. No, Palamon, 
Those hopes are prisoners with us : here we are, 
And here the graces of our youth must wither, 



98 THE AGE OP ELIZABETH. 

Like a too timely spring : here age must find us, 
And, which is heaviest, Palamon, unmarried ; 
The sweet embraces of a loving wife, 
Loaden with kisses, arm'd with thousand Cupids, 
Shall never clasp our necks ! No issue know us, 
No figures of ourselves shall we e'er see, 
To glad our age, and like young eaglets teach 'eni 
Boldly to gaze against bright arms, and say, 
Remember what your fathers were, and conquer! 
The fair-eyed maids shall weep our banishments, 
And in their songs curse ever-blinded fortune. 
Till she for shame see what a wrong she has done 
To youth and nature. This is all our world : 
We shall know nothing here, but one another ; 
Hear nothing but the clock that tells our woes ; 
The vine shall grow, but we shall never see it : 
Summer shall come, and with her all delights, 
But dead-cold winter must inhabit here still. 

Pal. 'Tis too true, Arcite ! To our Theban hounds, 
That shook the aged forest with their echoes, 
No more now must we hallow ; no more shake 
Our pointed javelins, while the angry swine 
Flies, like a Parthian quiver, from our rages, 
Struck with our well-steel'd darts ! All valiant uses 
(The food and nourishment of noble minds) 
In us two here shall perish ; we shall die 
(Which is the curse of honour) lazily. 
Children of grief and ignorance. 

Arc. Yet, cousin. 
Even from the bottom of these miseries. 
From all that fortune can inflict upon us, 
I see two comforts rising, two mere blessings, 
If the gods please to hold here ; a brave patience, 
And the enjoying of our griefs together. 
Whilst Palamon is with me,'let me perish 
If I think this our prison ! 

Pal. Certainly, 
'Tis a main goodness, cousin, that our fortunes 
Were twinn'd together ; 'tis most true, two souls 
Put in two noble bodies, let 'em suffer 
The gall of hazard, so they grow together, 
Will never sink; they must not, say they could; 
A willing man dies sleeping, and all's done. 

Arc. Shall we make worthy uses of this place, 
That all men hate so much 1 
Pal. How, gentle cousin 1 
Arc. Let's think this prison a holy sanctuary 



ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, BEN JONSON, ETC. 99 



To keep us from corruption of worse men 

We 're young, and yet desire the ways of honour ; 

That, liberty and common conversation, 

The poison of pure spirits, might, like women. 

Woo us to wander from. What worthy blessing 

Can be, but our imaginations 

May make it ours 1 And here, being thus together 

We are an endless mine to one another j 

We 're father, friends, acquaintance ; 

We are, in one another, families ; 

I am your heir, and you are mine ; this place 

Is our inheritance ; no hard oppressor 

Dare take this from us ; here, with a Uitle patience. 

We shall live long, and loving; no surfeits seek us: 

The hand of war hurts none here, nor the seas 

Swallow their youth ; were we at liberty, 

A wife might part us lawfully, or business ; 

auarrels consume us ; envy of ill men 

Crave our acquaintance ; I might sicken, cousin 

Where you should never know it, and so perish 

Without your noble hand to close mine eyes. 

Or prayers to the gods : a thousand chances. 

Were we from hence, would sever us. 

Pal. You have made me 
(I thank you, cousin Arcite) almost wanton 
With my captivity; what a misery 
It is to live abroad, and everywhere ! 
'Tis like a beast, methinks ! I find the court here, 
I'm sure a more content ; and all those pleasures, 
That woo the wills of men to vanity, 
I see through now; and am sufficient 
To tell the world 'tis but a gaudy shadow 
That old Time, as he passes by, takes with him. 
What had we been, old in the court of Creon, 
Where sin is justice, lust and ignorance 
The virtues of the great onesl Cousin Arcite, 
Had not the loving gods found this place for us, 
We had died as they now, ill old men unwept, 
And had their epitaphs, — the people's curses 1 
Shall I say more ^ 

Arc. I would hear you still. 

Pal. You shall. 
Is there the record of any two that lov'd 
Better than we do, Arcite 1 

Arc. Sure there cannot. 

Pal. I do not think it possible our friendship 
Should ever leave us. 

Arc. Till our deaths it cannot." 



100 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

Thus they " sing their bondage freely ;" but just then enters 
Emilia, who parts all this friendship between them, and turns 
them to deadliest foes. 

The jailor's daughter, who falls in love with Palamon, and 
goes mad, is a wretched interpolation in the story, and a fantastic 
copy of Ophelia. But they readily availed themselves of all the 
dramatic common-places to be found in Shakspeare, — love, mad- 
ness, processions, sports, imprisonment, &c., and copied him too 
often in earnest, to have a right to parody him, as they sometimes 
did, in jest. The story of ' The Two Noble Kinsmen' is taken 
from Chaucer's ' Palamon and Arcite ;' but the latter part, which 
in Chaucer is full of dramatic power and interest, degenerates in 
the play into a mere narrative of the principal events, and pos- 
sesses little value or effect. It is not improbable that Beaumont 
and Fletcher's having dramatized this story, put Dryden upon 
modernizing it. 

I cannot go through all Beaumont and Fletcher's dramas (52 
in number), but I have mentioned some of the principal, and the 
excellences and defects of the rest may be judged of from these. 
< The Bloody Brother', ' A Wife for a Month,' ' Bonduca,' 
' Thierry and Theodoret,' are among the best of their tragedies : 
among the comedies, ' The Night Walker,' ' The Little French 
Lawyer,' and ' Monsieur Thomas,' come perhaps next to ' The 
Chances,' ' The Wild Goose Chase,' and ' Rule a Wife and Have 
a Wife.' — ' Philaster, or. Love Lies a-Bleeding,' is one of the 
most admirable productions of these authors (the last I shall 
mention) ; and the patience of Euphrasia, disguised as Bellario, 
the tenderness of Arethusa, and the jealousy of Philaster, are 
beyond all praise. The passages of extreme romantic beauty 
and high- wrought passion that I might quote are out of number. 
One only must suffice, the account of the commencement of 
Euphrasia's love to Philaster : 

" Sitting in my window, 

Printing ray thought in lawn, I saw a Goa 
I thought (but it was you) enter our gates; 
My blood flew out, and back again as fast 
As I had puffed it forth and suck'd it in 
Like breath ; then was I called away in haste 
To entertain you. Never was a man 



ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, BEN JONSON, ETC. 101 

Heav'd from a sheep-cote to a sceptre, rais'd 
So high in thoughts as I : you left a kiss 
Upon these lips then, which I mean to keep 
From you for ever. I did hear you talk 
Far above singing !" 

And so it is our poets themselves write, " far above singing."* I 
am loth to part with them, and wander down, as we now must, 

" Into a lower world, to theirs obscure 

And wild — to breathe in other air 

Less pure, accustomed to immortal fruits." 

Ben Jonson's serious productions are, in my opinion, superior 
to his comic ones. What he does, is the result of strong sense 
and painful industry ; but sense and industry agree better with 
the grave and severe, than with the light and gay productions of 
the muse. " His plays were works," as some one said of them, 
" while others' works were plays." The observation had less of 
compliment than of truth in it. He may be said to mine his way 
into a subject, like a mole, and throws up a prodigious quantity 
of matter on the surface, so that the richer the soil in which he 
labours, the less dross and rubbish we have. His fault is, that 
he sets himself too much to his subject, and cannot let go his hold 
of an idea, after the insisting on it becomes tiresome or painful to 
others. But his tenaciousness of what is grand and lofty, is more 
praiseworthy than his delight in what is low and disagreeable. 
His pedantry accords better with didactic pomp than with illite- 
rate and vulgar gabble ; his learning, engrafted on romantic tra- 
dition or classical history, looks like genius. 

" Miraturque novas frondes et non sua poma." 

He was equal, by an effort, to the highest things, and took the 
same, and even more successful pains to grovel to the lowest. 
He raised himself up or let himself down to the level of his sub- 

♦ Euphrasia as the Page, just before speaking of her life, which Philaster 
threatens to take from her, says, 

" 'Tis not a life ; 

'Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away." 

What exquisite beauty and delicacy ! 



103 THE AGE OP ELIZABETH. 

ject, by ponderous machinery. By dint of application, and a 
certain strength of nerve, he could do justice to Tacitus and 
Sallust no less than to mine host of the New Inn. His tragedy 
of * The Fall of Sejanus,' in particular, is an admirable piece 
of ancient mosaic. The principal character gives one the idea 
of a lofty column of solid granite, nodding to its base from its 
pernicious height, and dashed in pieces by a breath of air, a 
word of its creator — feared, not pitied, scorned, unwept, and for- 
gotten. The depth of knowledge and gravity of expression sus- 
tain one another throughout : the poet has worked out the his- 
torian's outline, so that the vices and passions, the ambition and 
servility of public men, in the heated and poisoned atmosphere 
of a luxurious and despotic court, were never described in fuller 
or more glowing colours. I am half afraid to give any extracts, 
lest they should be tortured into an application to other times 
and characters than those referred to by the poet. Some of the 
sounds, indeed, may bear (for what I know) an awkward con- 
struction : some of the objects may look double to squint-eyed 
suspicion. But that is not my fault. It only proves that the 
characters of prophet and poet are implied in each other ; that 
he who describes human nature well once, describes it for good 
and all, as it was, is, and, I begin to fear, will ever be. Truth 
always was, and must always remain, a libel to the tyrant and 
the slave. Thus Satrius Secundus and Pinnarius Natta, two 
public informers in those days, are described as 

" Two of Sejanus' blood-hounds, whom he breeds 
With human flesh, to bay at citizens," 

But Rufus, another of the same well-bred gang, debating the 
point of his own character with two senators whom he has en- 
trapped, boldly asserts, in a more courtly strain, 

" To be a spy on traitors 

Is honourable vigilance." 

This sentiment of the respectability of the employment of a 
government spy, which had slept in Tacitus for near two thou- 
sand years, has not been without its modem patrons. The effecta 



ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, BEN JONSON, ETC. 103 

of such " honourable vigilance" are very finely exposed in the 
following high-spirited dialogue between Lepidus and Arruntius, 
two noble Romans, who loved their country, but were not un- 
fashionable enough to confound their country with its oppressors, 
and the extinguishers of its liberty. 

" An. What are thy arts (good patriot, teach them me) 
That have preserv'd thy hairs to this white dye, 
And kept so reverend and so dear a head 
Safe on his comely shoulders % 

Lep. Arts, Arruntius ! 
None but the plain and passive fortitude 
To suffer and be silent ; never stretch 
These arms against the torrent ; live at home 
With my own thoughts and innocence about me. 
Not tempting the wolves' jaws: these are my arts. 

Air. I would begin to study 'em, if I thought 
They would secure me. May I pray to Jove 
In secret, and be safe 7 ay, or aloud 'J 
With open wishes 1 so I do not mention 
Tiberius or Sejanus ! Yes, I must, 
If I speak out. 'Tis hard, that. May I think, 
And not be rack'd 7 What danger is't to dream 1 
Talk in one's sleep, or cough ^ Who knows the law^ 
May I shake my head without a comment % Say 
It rains, or it holds up, and not be thrown 
Upon the Gemonies^ These now are things 
Whereon men's fortunes, yea, their fate depends; 
Nothing hath privilege 'gainst the violent ear. 
No place, no day, no hour (we see) is free 
(Not our religious and most sacred times) 
From some one kind of cruelty ; all matter, 
Nay, all occasion pleaseth. Madman's rage, 
The idleness of drunkards, women's nothing, 
Jesters' simplicity, all, all is good 
That can be catch'd at." 

'Tis a pretty picture ; and the duplicates of it, though multi- 
plied without end, are seldom out of request. 

The following portrait of a prince besieged by flatterers (taken 
from « Tiberius') has unrivalled force and beauty, with historic 
truth 

" If this man 

Had but a mind allied unto his words, 



104 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

How blest a fate were it to us, and Rome *? 

Men are deceived,who think there can be thrall 

Under a virtuous prince. Wish'd liberty 

Ne'er lovelier looks than under such a crown. 

But when his grace is merely but lip-good, 

And that, no longer than he airs himself 

Abroad in public, there to seem to shun 

The strokes and stripes of flatterers, which within 

Are lechery unto him, and so feed 

His brutish sense with iheir afflicting sound, 

As (dead to virtue) he permits himself 

Be carried like a pitcher by the ears 

To every act of vice ; this is a case 

Deserves our fear, and doth presage the nigh 

And close approach of bloody tyranny. 

Flattery is midwife unto princes' rage : 

And nothing sooner doth help forth a tyrant 

Than that, and whisperers' grace, that have the time, 

The place, the power, to make all men offenders !" 

The only part of this play in which Ben Jonson has completely 
forgotten himself (or rather seems not to have done so) is in the 
conversations between Livia and Eudemus, about a wash for her 
face, here called a fucus, to appear before Sejanus. ' Catiline's 
Conspiracy' does not furnish by any means an equal number of 
striking passages, and is spun out to an excessive length with 
Cicero's artificial and affected orations against Catiline, and in 
praise of himself. His apologies for his own eloquence, and 
declarations that in all his art he uses no art at all, put one in 
mind of Polonius's circuitous way of coming to the point. Both 
these tragedies, it might be observed, are constructed on the ex- 
act principles of a French historical picture, where every head 
and figure is borrowed from the antique ; but, somehow, the pre- 
cious materials of old Roman history and character are better 
preserved in Jonson's page than on David's canvas. 

Two, of the most poetical passages in Ben Jonson are the 
description of Echo in ' Cynthia's Revels,' and the fine compari- 
son of the mind to a temple, in the ' New Inn ;' a play which, on 
the whole, however, I can read with no patience. 

I must hasten to conclude this Lecture with some account of 
Massinger and Ford, who wrote in the time of Charles I. I am 
sorry I cannot do it con amore. The writers of whom I have 



ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, BEN JONSON, ETC. 105 

chiefly had to speak were true poets, impassioned, fanciful, " mu- 
sical as is Apollo's lute ;" but Massinger is harsh and crabbed, 
Ford finical and fastidious. I find little in the works of these 
two dramatists, but a display of great strength or subtlety of un- 
derstanding, inveteracy of purpose, and perversity of will. This 
is not exactly what we look for in poetry, which, according to the 
most approved recipes, should combine pleasure with profit, and 
not owe all its fascination over the mind to its power of shocking 
or perplexing us. The muses should attract by grace or dignity of 
mien. Massinger makes an impression by hardness and repul- 
siveness of manner. In the intellectual processes which he delights 
to describe, " reason panders will :" he fixes arbitrarily on some 
object which there is no motive to pursue, or every motive com- 
bined against it, and then, by screwing up his heroes or heroines to 
the deliberate and blind accomplishment of this, thinks to arrive at 
" the true pathos and sublime of human life." That is not the way. 
He seldom touches the heart, or kindles the fancy. It is in vain to 
hope to excite much sympathy v/ith convulsive efforts of the will, 
or intricate contrivances of the understanding, to obtain that 
which is better left alone, and where the interest arises princi- 
pally from the conflict between the absurdity of the passion and 
the obstinacy with which it is persisted in. For the most part, 
his villains are a sort of lusus nature ; his impassioned charac- 
ters are like drunkards or madmen. Their conduct is extreme 
and outrageous, their motives unaccountable and weak ; their 
misfortunes are without necessity, and their crimes without 
temptation, to ordinary apprehensions. I do not say that this is 
invariably the case in all Massinger's scenes, but I think it 
will be found that a principle of playing at cross-purposes is the 
ruling passion throughout most of them. This is the case in the 
tragedy of ' The Unnatural Combat,' in ' The Picture,' ' The 
Duke of Milan,' '■ A New Way to Pay Old Debts,' and even in 
' The Bondman,' and ' The Virgin Martyr,' &c. In ' The Pic- 
ture,' Matthias nearly loses his wife's affections, by resorting to 
the far-fetched and unnecessary device of procuring a magical 
portrait to read the slightest variation in her thoughts. In the 
same play, Honoria risks her reputation and her life to gain a 
clandestine interview with Matthias, merely to shake his fidelity 
8 



106 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

to his wife, and when she has gained her object, tells the king 
her husband in pure caprice and fickleness of purpose. ' The 
Virgin Martyr' is nothing but a tissue of instantaneous conver- 
sions to and from Paganism and Christianity. The only scenes 
of any real beauty and tenderness in this play, are those between 
Dorothea and Angelo, her supposed friendless beggar-boy, but 
her guardian angel in disguise, which are understood to be by 
Decker. The interest of ' The Bondman' turns upon two differ- 
ent acts of penance and self-denial, in the persons of the hero 
and heroine, Pisander and Cleora. In the Duke of Milan 
(the most poetical of Massinger's productions), Sforza's resolu- 
tion to destroy his wife, rather than bear the thought of her sur- 
viving him, is as much out of the verge of nature and probabili- 
ty, as it is unexpected and revolting, from the want of any cir- 
cumstances of palliation leading to it. It stands out alorle, a 
pure piece of voluntary atrocity, which seems not the dictate of 
passion, but a start of phrensy ; as cold-blooded in the execution 
as it is extravagant in the conception. 

Again, Francesco, in this play, is a person whose actions we 
are at a loss to explain till the conclusion of the piece, when the 
attempt to account for ibem from motives originally amiable and 
generous, only produces a double sense of incongruity, and in- 
stead of satisfying the mind, renders it totally incredulous. He 
endeavours to seduce the wife of his benefactor, he then (failing) 
attempts her death, slanders her foully, and wantonly causes her 
to be slain by the hand of her husband, and has him poisoned by 
a nefarious stratagem, and all this to appease a high sense of 
injured honour, that " felt a stain like a wound," and from the 
tender overflowing of fraternal affection, his sister having, it ap- 
pears, been formerly betrothed to, and afterwards deserted by, 
the Duke of Milan. Sir Giles Overreach is the most successful 
and striking effort of Massinger's pen, and the best known to the 
reader, but it will hardly be thought to form an exception to the 
tenor of the above rem.arks.* The same spirit of caprice and 

* The following criticism on this play has appeared in another publication, 
but may be not improperly inserted here : 

" ' A New Way to Pay Old Debts' is certainly a very admirable play, and 
highly characteristic of the genius of its author, which was hard and forcible, 



ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, BEN JONSON, ETC. 107 

sullenness survives in Rowe's ' Fair Penitent,' taken from this 
author's ' Fatal Dowry.' 

Ford is not so great a favourite with me as with some others, 
from whose judgment I dissent with diffidence. It has been la- 

and calculated rather to produce a strong impression than a pleasing one. 
There is considerable unity of design and a progressive interest in the fable, 
though the artifice by which the catastrophe is brought about (the double as- 
sumption of the character of favoured lovers by Wellborn and Lovell)is some- 
what improbable, and out of date ; and the moral is peculiarly striking, be- 
cause its whole weight falls upon one who all along prides himself in setting 
every principle of justice and all fear of consequences at defiance. 

" The character of Sir Giles Overreach (tJie most prominent feature of the 
play, whether in the perusal, or as it is actedj interests us less by exciting our 
sympathy than our indignation. We hate him very heartily, and yet not 
enough ; for he has strong, robust points about him that repel the imperti- 
nence of censure, and he sometimes succeeds in making us stagger in our 
opinion of his conduct, by throwing off any idle doubts or scruples that 
might hang upon it in his own mind, ' like dew-drops from the lion's mane.' 
His steadiness of purpose scarcely stands in need of support from the com- 
mon sanctions of moralit/, which he intrepidly breaks through, and he almost 
conquers our prejudices by the consistent and determined manner in which he 
braves them. Self-interest is his idol, and he makes no secret of his idolatry : 
he is only a more devoted and unblushing worshipper at this shrine than other 
men. Self wiil is the only rule of his conduct, to which he makes every other 
feeling bend : or rather, from the nature of his constitution, he has no sickly, 
sentimental obstacles to interrupt him in his headstrong career. He is a char- 
acter of obdurate self-will, without fanciful notions or natural affections ; one 
who has no regard to the feelings of others, and who professes an equal disre- 
gard to their opinions. He minds nothing but his own ends, and takes the 
shortest and surest way to them. His understanding is clear-sighted, and his 
passions strong-nerved. Sir Giles is no flincher, and no hypocrite ; and he 
gains almost as much by the hardihood with which he avows his impudent 
and sordid designs as others do by their caution in concealing them. He is 
the demon of selfishness personified ; and carves out his way to the objects 
of his unprincipled avarice and ambition with an arm of steel, that strikes but 
does not feel the blow it inflicts. The character of calculating, systematic 
self love, as the master-key to all his actions, is preserved with great truth of 
keeping and in the most trifling circumstances. Thus ruminating to himself, 
he says, " I'll walk, to get me an appetite : 'tis but a mile; and exercise will 
keep me from being pursy !'— Yet, to show the absurdity and impossibility 
of a man's being governed by any such pretended exclusive regard to his own 
interest, this very Sir Giles, who laughs at conscience, and scorns opinion, 
who ridicules every thing as fantastical but wealth, solid, substantial wealth, 
and boasts of himself as having been the founder of his own fortune, by his 
contempt for eveiy other consideration, is ready to sacrifice the whole of his 



108 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

mented that the play of his which has been most admired (' 'Tis 
Pity She's a Whore') had not a less exceptionable subject. I do 
not know, but I suspect that the exceptionableness of the subject 
is that which constitutes the chief merit of the play. The re- 
enormous possessions — to what 1 — to a title, a sound, to make his daughter 
* right honourable,' the wife of a lord whose name he cannot repeat without 
loathing, and in the end he becomes the dupe of, and falls a victim to, that 
very opinion of the world which he despises ! 

" The character of Sir Giles Overreach has been found fault with as unna- 
tural ; and it may, perhaps, in the present refinement of our manners, have 
become in a great measure obsolete. But we doubt v/hether even still, in re- 
mote and insulated parts of the country, sufficient traces of the same charac- 
ter of wilful selfishness, mistaking; the inveteracy of its purposes for their 
rectitude, and boldly appealing to power, as justifying the abuses of power, 
may not be found to warrant this mi undoubted original — probably a fac- 
simile of some individual of the poet's actual acquaintance. In less advanced 
periods of society than that in which we live, if we except rank, which can 
neither be an object of common pursuit nor immediate attainment, money is 
the only acknowledged passport to respect. It is not merely valuable as a 
security from want, but it is the only defence against the insolence of power. 
Avarice is sharpened by pride and necessity. There are then few of the arts, 
the amusements, and accomplishments, that soften and sweeten life, that raise 
or refine it: the only way in which any one can be of service to himself or 
another, is by his command over the gross commoduies of life -. and a man is 
worth just so much as he has. Where he who is not ' lord of acres' is looked 
upon as a slave and a beggar, the soul becomes wedded n the soil by which 
its worth is measured, and takes root in it in proportion to its own strength 
and stubbornness of character. The example of Wellborn may be cited in 
illustration of these remarks. The loss of his land makes all tVie difference 
between ' young master Wellborn' and ' rogue Wellborn ;' and the treatment 
he meets with in this latter capacity is the best apology for the character of 
Sir Giles. Of the two, it is better to be the oppressor than the oppressed. 

" Massinger, it is true, dealt generally in extreme characters, as well as in 
very repulsive ones. The passion is with him wound up to its height at first, 
and he never lets it down afterwards. It does not gradually arise out of pre- 
vious circumstances, nor is it modified by other passions. This gives an ap- 
pearance of abruptness, violence, and extravagance to all his plays. Shaks- 
peare's characters act from mixed motives, and are made what they are by 
various circumstances. Massinger's characters act from single motives, and 
become what they are, and remain so, by a pure effort of the will, in spite of 
circumstances. This last author endeavoured to embody an abstract princi- 
ple ; labours hard to bring out the same individual trait in its most exaggerated 
state ; and the force of his impassioned characters arises for the most part from 
the obstinacy with which they exclude every other feeling. Their vices look 
of a gigantic stature from their standing alone. Their actions seem extrava- 



ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, BEN JONSON, ETC. 109 

pulsiveness of the story is what gives it its critical interest ; for 
it is a studiously prosaic statement of facts, and naked declara . 
tion of passions. It was not the least of^Shakspeare's praise, 
that he never tampered with unfair subjects. His genius was 
above it ; his taste kept aloof from it. I do not deny the power 
of simple painting and polished style in this tragedy in general, 
and of a great deal more in some few of the scenes, particularly 
in the quarrel between Annabella and her husband, which is 
wrought up to a pitch of demoniac scorn and phrensy with con- 
summate art and knowledge ; but I do not find much o{her power 
in the author (generally speaking) than that of playing with 
edged tools, and knowing the use of poisoned w^eapons. And 
what confirms me in this opinion is the comparative inefficiency 
of 'his other plays. Except the last scene of ' The Broken 
Heart' (which I think extravagant — others may think it sublime, 
and be right), they are merely exercises of style and effusions 
of wire-drawn sentiment. Where they have not the sting of il- 
licit passion, they are quite pointless, and seem painted on gauze, 
or spun of cobwebs. The affected brevity and division of some 
of the lines into hemisticks, &c. so as to make in one case a 

gant from their having always the same fixed aim — the same incon-igible pur- 
pose. The fault of Sir Giles Overreach, in this respect, is less in the excess 
to which he pushes a favourite propensity, than in the circumstance of its 
being unmixed with any other virtue or vice. 

" We may find the same simplicity of dramatic conception in the comic as 
in the tragic characters of the author. Justice Greedy has but one idea or 
subject in his head throughout. He is always eating, or talking of eating. 
His belly is always in his mouth, and we know nothing of him but his appe- 
tite; he is as sharpset as travellers from off a journey. His land of promise 
touches on the borders of the wilderness : his thoughts are constantly in ap- 
prehension of feasting or famishing. A fat turkey floats before his imagina- 
tion in royal state, and his hunger sees visions of chines of beef, venison 
pasties, and Norfolk dumplings, as if it were seized with a calenture. He is 
a very amusing personage ; and in what relates to eating and drinking, as 
peremptory as Sir Giles himself — Marrall is another instance of confined 
comic humour, whose ideas never wander beyond th^ ambition of being the 
implicit drudge of another's knavery or good fortune. He sticks to his stew- 
ardship, and resists the favour of a salute from a finfe lady, as not entered in 
his accounts. The humour of this character is less striking in the play than 
in Munden's personification of it. The other characters do not require any 
particular analysis. They are very insipid, good sort of people." 



no THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

mathematical stair-case of the words and answers given to dif- 
ferent speakers,* is an instance of frigid and ridiculous pedantry. 
An artificial elaborateness is the general characteristic of Ford's 
style. In this respect his plays resemble Miss Baillie's more 
than any others I am acquainted with, and are quite distinct 
from the exuberance and unstudied force which characterized 
his immediate predecessors. There is too much of scholastic 
subtlety, an innate perversity of understanding or predominance 
of will, which either seeks the irritation of inadmissible subjects, 
or to stimulate its own faculties by taking the most barren, and 
making something out of nothing, in a spirit of contradiction. 
He does not dra^v along iviili the reader : he does not work upon 
our sympathy, but on our antipathy or our indifference ; and 
there is as little of the social or gregarious principle in his pro- 
ductions as there appears to have been in his personal habits, if 
we are to believe Sir John Suckling, who says of him, in the 
Sessions of the Poets — 

" In die dumps John Ford alone by himself sat 
With folded arms and melancholy hat." 

I do not remember without considerable effort the plot or per- 
sons of most of his plays — ' Perkin Warbeck,' ' The Lover's 
Melancholy,' ' Love's Sacrifice,' and the rest. There is little 
character, except of the most evanescent or extravagant kind (to 
which last class we may refer that of the sister of Calantha in 
* The Broken Heart') — little imagery or fancy, and no action. It 
is but fair, however, to give a scene or two, in illustration of these 
remarks (or in confutation of them, if they are wrong), and I 
shall take the concluding one of * The Broken Heart,' which is 
held up as the author's master-piece. 

* " Ithocles. Soft peace enrich this room, 

Orgilns. How fares the lady 7 

Philema. Dead ! 

ChristaMa. Dead ! 

Pkilema. Starv'd ! 

ChristaJla. Starv'd ! 

Ithocles. Me miserable !" 



ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, BEN JONSON, ETC, 111 

" Scene — A Room in the Palace. 

A Flourhh. — Enter Euphranea, led by Groneas and Hemophil : Prophilus. 
led by Christalla and Philema: Nearchus supporting Calantha, 
Cbotolon, and Amelus. 

Cal. We miss our servants, Ithocles and Orgilus. On whom attend they ^ 

Crot. My son, gracious princess, 
Whisper'd some new device, to which these revels 
Should be but usher : wherein I conceive 
Lord Ithocles and he himself are actors. 

Cal. A fair excuse for absence. As for Bassanes, 
DeUghts to him are troublesome. Armostes 
Is with the king 1 

Crot, He is, 

Cal. On to the dance! 

Cousin, hand you the bride: the bridegroom must be 
Entrusted to my courtship. Be not jealous, 
Euphranea ; I shall scarcely prove a temptress. 
Fall to our dance ! 

{They dance the first change, during which en^er Armostes.) 

Arm. {In a whisper to Calantha.) The king your father's dead. 

Cal. To the other change. 

Arm. Is't possible 1 

TSiey dance the second change. — Enter Bassanes. 

Bo/ss. ( IfTiispers Calantha), Oh ! Madam, 
Penthea, poor Penthea's starv'd. 

Cal. Beshrew thee ! 
Lead to the next ! 

Bass. Amazement dulls my senses. 

They dance the third change. — Enter Orgiltjs. 
Org. Brave Ithocles is niurder'd, murder'd cruelly. 
Cal. How dull this music sounds ! Strike up more sprightly 
Our footings are not active Uke our heart,* 
Which treads the nimbler measure, 
Org. I am thunderstruck. 

TTie last change. 

Cal. So ; let us breathe awhile. {Music ceases.) Hath not this motion 
Rais'd fresher colours on our cheek 1 

]Siean\ Sweet princess, 
A perfect purity of blood enamels 
The beauty of your white. 

Cal. We all look cheerfully : 
And, cousin, 'tis, methinks, a rare presumption 

* " High as our heart." — See passage from the * Malcontent.' 



112 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



In any who prefers our lawful pleasures 
Before their own sour censure, to interrupt 
The custom of this ceremony bluntly. 

Near. None dares, lady. 

Cat. Yes, yes ; some hollow voice deliver'd to me 
How that the king was dead. 

Arm. The king is dead," &c. &c. 

This, I confess, appears to me to be tragedy in masquerade. Nor 
is it, I think, accounted for, though it may be in part redeemed by 
her solemn address at the altar to the dead body of her husband. 

•' Cal. Forgive me. Now I turn to thee, thou shadow 
Of my contracted lord ! Bear witness all, 
I put my mother's wedding ring upon 
His finger ; 'twas my father's last bequest : 

(Places a ring on the finger of Ithocles.) 
Thus I new many him, whose wife I am : 
Death shall not separate us. Oh, my lords, 
I but deceived your eyes with antic gesture. 
When one news strait came huddling on another 
Of deaths and death, and death : still I danced forward ; 
But it struck home and here, and in an instant. 
Be such mere women, who with shrieks and outcries 
Can vow a present end to all their sorrows. 
Yet live to court new pleasures, and outlive them: 
They are the silent griefs which cut the heartstrings : 
Let me die smiling. 

Near. 'Tis a truth too ominous. 

Cal. One kiss on these cold lips — my last : crack, crack 
Argos, now Sparta's king, command the voices 
Which wait at th' altar, now to sing the song 
I fitted for my end." 

And then, after the song, she dies. 

This is the true false gallop of sentiment : anything more arti- 
ficial and mechanical I cannot conceive. The boldness of the 
attempt, however, the very extravagance, might argue the re- 
liance of the author on the truth of feeling prompting him to 
hazard it ; but the whole scene is a forced transposition of that 
already alluded to in Marston's ' Malcontent.' Even the form of 
the stage directions is the same. 



ON BEAUMONT AND. FLETCHER, BEN JONSON, ETC 113 

Enter Mendozo, supporting the Duchess ; Guerrino ; the Ladies that are on 
the stage rise. Ferrardo ushers in the Duchess ; the?i takes a Lady to tread 
a measure. 
Aurelia. We will dance. Music ! we will dance. * * 
Enter Prepasso. 
Who saw the Duke 1 the Duke '? 
Aurelia. Mcisic ! 

Prepussa. The Duke 1 is the Duke returned "? 
Aitrelia. Music ! 

Enter Celso. 
The Duke is quite invisible, or else is not. 

Aurelia. We are not pleased with your intrusion upon our private retire- 
ment ; we are not pleased : you have forgot yourselves. 
Enter a Page. 
Celso. Boy, thy master 1 where's the Duke *? 

Page. Alas, I left him burying the earth with his spread joyless limbs; he 
told me he was heavy, would sleep : bid me walk off, for the strength of 
fantasy oft made him talk in his dreams : I strait obeyed, nor ever saw him 
since ; but wheresoe'er he is, he's sad. 
Aurelia. Music, sound high, as is our heart; sound high. 

Enter Malevole and her Husband, disguised like a Hermit. 
Malevole. The Duke 1 Peace, the Duke is dead. 
Aurelia, Music !" Act IV. Scene 3, 

The passage in Ford appears to me an ill-judged copy from 
this. That a woman should call for music, and dance on in spite 
of the death of her husband whom she hates, without regard to 
common decency, is but too possible : that she should dance on 
with the same heroic perseverance in spite of the death of her 
husband, of her father, and of every one else whom she loves, 
from regard to common courtesy or appearance, is not surely 
natural. The passions may silence the voice of humanity, but 
it is, I think, equally against probability and decorum to make 
both the passions and the voice of humanity give way (as in the 
example of Calantha) to a mere form of outward behaviour. Such 
a suppression of the strongest and most uncontroulable feelings 
can only be justified from necessity, for some great purpose, 
which is not the case in Ford's play ; or it must be done for the 
effect and eclat of the thing, which is not fortitude but affectation. 
Mr. Lamb, in his impressive eulogy on this passage in ' The 



il4 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

Broken Heart/ has failed (as far as I can judge) in establishing 
the parallel between this uncalled-for exhibition of stoicism, and 
the story of the Spartan boy. 

It may be proper to remark here, that most of the great men 
of the period I have treated of (except the greatest of all, and 
one other,) were men of classical education. They were learned 
men in an unlettered age ; not self-taught men in a literary and 
critical age. This circumstance should be taken into the ac- 
count in a theory of the dramatic genius of that age. Except 
Shakspeare, nearly all of them, indeed, came up from Oxford or 
Cambridge, and immediately began to write for the stage. No 
wonder. The first coming up to London in those days must have 
had a singular effect upon a young man of genius, almost like 
visiting Babylon or Susa, or a journey to the other world. The 
stage (even as it then was,) after the recluseness and austerity 
of a college life, must have appeared like Armida's enchanted 
palace, and its gay votaries like 

" Fairy elves beyond the Indian mount, 

Whose midnight revels, by a forest side 

Or fountain, some belated peasant sees, 

Or dreams he sees ; while overhead the moon 

Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth 

Wheels her pale course : they on their mirth and dance 

Intent, with jocund music charm his ear: 

At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds." 

So our young novices must have felt when they first saw the 
magic of the scene, and heard its syren sounds with rustic won- 
der and the scholar's pride : and the joy that streamed from their 
eyes at that fantastic vision, at that gaudy shadow of life, of all 
its business and all its pleasures, and kindled their enthusiasm 
to join the mimic throng, still has left a long lingering glory be- 
hind it ; and though now " deaf the praised ear, and mute the 
tuneful tongue," lives in their eloquent page, " informed with 
music, sentiment, and thought, never to die !" 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 115 



LECTURE V. 

On Single Plays, Poems, &c. — The Four P's, The Return from Parnassus, 
Gammer Gurton's Needle, and other Works. 

I SHALL, in this lecture, turn back to give some account of single 
plays, poems, &c. ; the authors of which are either not known 
or not very eminent, and the productions themselves, in general, 
more remarkable for their singularity, or as specimens of the 
style and manners of the age, than for their intrinsic merit or 
poetical excellence. There are many more works of this kind, 
however, remaining, than I can pretend to give an account of; 
and what I shall chiefly aim at, will be to excite the curiosity of 
the reader, rather than to satisfy it. 

' The Four P's' is an interlude, or comic dialogue, in verse, 
between a Palmer, a Pardoner, a Poticary, and a Pedlar, in 
which each exposes the tricks of his own and his neighbours' 
profession, with much humour and shrewdness. It was written 
by John Heywood, the Epigrammatist, who flourished chiefly in 
the reign of Henry VIIL, was the intimate friend of Sir Thomas 
More, with whom he seems to have had a congenial spirit, and 
died abroad, in consequence of his devotion to the Roman Catholic 
cause, about the year 1565. His zeal, however, on this head, 
does not seem to have blinded his judgment, or to have prevented 
him from using the utmost freedom and severity in lashing the 
abuses of Popery, at which he seems to have looked " with the 
malice of a friend." ' The Four P's' bears the date of 1547. It 
is very curious, as an evidence both of the wit, the manners, and 
opinions of the time. Each of the parties in the dialogue gives 
an account of the boasted advantages of his own particular calling, 
that is, of the frauds which he practises on credulity and igno- 
rance, and is laughed at by the others in turn. In fact, they all 
of them strive to outbrave each other, till the contest becomes a 
jest, and it ends in a wager who shall tell the greatest lie, when 



116 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

the prize is adjudged to him who says that he had found a patient 
woman.* The common superstitions (here recorded) in civil and 
religious matters are almost incredible ; and the chopped logic, 
which was the fashion of the time, and which comes in aid of the 
author's shrewd and pleasant sallies to expose them, is highly 
entertainino-. Thus the Pardoner, scorning the Palmer's long 
pilgrimages and circuitous road to heaven, flouts him to his face, 
and vaunts his own superior pretensions : 

" Pard. By the first part of this last tale, 
It seemeth you came of late from the ale: 
For reason on your side so far doth fail, 
That you leave reasoning, and begin to rail. 
Wherein you forget your own part clearly, 
For you be as untrue as I : 
But in one part you are beyond me, ' 

For you may lie by authority, 
And all that have wandered so far, 
That no man can be their controller, 
And where you esteem yovu' labour so much 
I say yet again, my pardons are such, 
That if there were a thousand souls on a heap, 
I would bring them all to heaven as good sheep, 
As you have brought yourself on pilgrimage, 
In the last quarter of your voyage, 
Which is far a-this side heaven, by God: 
There your labour and pardon is odd. 
With small cost without any pain, 
These pardons bring them to heaven plain: 
Give me but a penny or two-pence. 
And as soon as the soul departeth hence, 
In half an hour, or three quarters at the most. 
The soul is in heaven with the Holy Ghost." 

The Poticary does not approve of this arrogance of the Friar, 
and undertakes, in mood and figure, to prove them both " false 
knaves." It is he, he says, who sends most souls to heaven, 
and who ought, therefore, to have the credit of it. 

" No soul, ye know, entereth heaven-gate, 

Till from the body he be separate: 

And whom have ye known die honestly, 

* Or, never known one otherwise than patient 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 117 

Without help of the Poticary 1 
Nay, all that cometh to our handling, 
Except ye hap to come to hanging. 
Since of our souls the multitude 
I send to heaven, when all is view'd 
Who should but I then altogether 
Have thank of all their coming thither 1" 

The Pardoner here interrupts him captiously — 

" If ye kill'd a thousand in an hour's space, 
When come they to heaven, dying out of grace*?" 

But the Poticary, not so baffled, retorts — 

" If a thousand pardons about your necks were tied ; 
When come they to heaven, if they never died 

******* 
But when ye feel your conscience ready, 
I can send you to heaven very quickly." 

The Pedlar finds out the v/eak side of his new companions, 
and tells them very bluntly, on their referring their dispute to him, 
a piece of his mind. 

" Now have I found one mastery, 
That ye can do indifferently; 
And it is neither selling nor buying, 
But even only very lying." 

At this game of imposture, the cunning dealer in pins and 
laces undertakes to judge their merits ; and they accordingly set 
to work like regular graduates. The Pardoner takes the lead, 
with an account of the virtues of his relics ; and here we may 
find a plentiful mixture of popish superstition and indecency. 
The bigotry of any age is by no means" a test of its piety, or 
even sincerity. Men seemed to make themselves amends for the 
enormity of their faith by levity of feeling, as well as by laxity 
of principle ; and in the indifference or ridicule with which they 
treated the wil'ful absurdities and extravagances to which they 
hood-winked their understandings, almost resembled children 
playing at blindman's-bufT, who grope their way in the dark, 
and make blunders on purpose to laugh at their own idleness and 



118 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



folly. The sort of mummery at which popish bigotry used to 
play at the time when this old comedy was written, was not quite 
so harmless as blindman's-buff: what was sport to her, was death 
to others. She laughed at her own mockeries of common sense 
and true religion, and murdered while she laughed. The tragic 
farce was no longer to be borne, and it was partly put an end 
to. At present, though her eyes are blind-folded, her hands are 
tied fast behind her, like the false Duessa's. The sturdy genius 
of modern philosophy has got her in much the same situation 
that Count Fathom has the old woman that he lashes before him 
from the robbers' cave in the forest. In the following dialogue 
of this lively satire, the most sacred mysteries of the Catholic 
faith are rpixed up with its idlest legends by old Heywood, who 
was a martyr to his religious zeal, without the slightest sense of 
impropriety. The Pardoner cries out in one place (like a lusty 
Friar John, or a trusty Friar Onion) — 

" Lo, here be pardons, half a dozen, 

For ghostly riches they have no cousin 

And, moreover, to me they bring 

Sufficient succour for my living. 

And here be relics of such a kind 

As in this world no man can find. 

Kneel down all three, and when ye leave kissing, 

Who list to offer shall have my blessing. 

Friends, here shall ye see, even anon. 

Of All-Hallows the blessed jaw-bone. 

Mark well this, this relic here is a whipper ; 

My friends unfeigned, here's a slipper 

Of one of the seven sleepers, be sure. — 

Here is an eye-tooth of the great Turk : 

Whose eyes be once set on this piece of work, 

May happily lose part of his eye-sight, 

But not all till he be blind outright. 

Kiss it hardly, with good^evotion. 

Pol. This kiss shall bring us much promotion; 
Fogh ! by St. Saviour, I never kiss'd a worse. 

* *. * * * * * * 
For, by All-Hallows, yet methinketh 
That All-Hallows' breath stinketh. 

Palm. Ye judge All-Hallows' breath unknown: 
If any breath stink, it is your own. 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 119 

Pot. I know mine own breath from AU-HallowSj 
Or else it were time to kiss the gallows. 

Pard. Nay, sirs, here may ye see 
The great toe of the Trinity: 
Who 10 this toe any money voweth, 
And once may roll it in his mouth. 
All his life after I undertake 
He shall never be vex'd with the tooth-ache. 

Pot. I pray you turn that relic about ; 
Either the Trinity had the gout, 
Or else, because it is three toes in one, 
God made it as much as three toes alone. 

Pard. Well, let that pass, and look upon this : 
Here is a relic that doth not miss 
To help the least as well as the most: 
This is a buttock-bone of Pentecost. 
******* 

Here is a box full of humble-bees. 
That stung Eve as she sat on her knees 
Tasting the fruit to her forbidden : 
Who kisseth the bees within this hidden, 
Shall have as much pardon of right, 
As for any relic he kiss'd this night. 
Good friends, I have yet here in this glass, 
Which on the drink at the wedding was 
Of Adam and Eve undoubtedly : 
If ye honour this relic devoutly. 
Although ye thirst no whit the less, 
Yet shall ye drink the more, doubtless. 
After which drinking, ye shall be as meet 
To stand on your head as on your feet." 

The same sort of significant irony runs through the Apothe- 
cary's knavish enumeration of miraculous cures in his possession : 

" For this medicine helpeth one and other. 

And bringeth them in case that they need no other. 

Here is a syrapus de Byzansis^ — 

A little thing is enough of this ; 

For even the weight of one scrippal 

Shall make you as strong as a cripple. 

These be the things that break all strife 

Between man's sickness and his life. 

From all pain these shall you deliver, 

And set you even at rest for ever. 

Here is a medicine no more like the same, 



120 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

Which commonly is called thus by name. 

Not one thing here particularly, 

But worketh universally; 

For it doth me as much good when I sell it, 

As all the buyers that take it or smell it. 

If any reward may entreat ye, 

I beseech your mastership be good to me, 

And ye shall have a box of marmalade. 

So fine that you may dig it with a spade." 

After these quaint but pointed examples of it, Swift's boast 
with respect to the invention of irony, 

" Which I was born to introduce, 
Refin'd it first, and shew'd its use, 

can be allowed to be true only in part. 

The controversy between them being undecided, the Apothe- 
cary, to clench his pretensions " as a liar of the first magnitude," 
by a coup-de-grace, says to the Pedlar, " You are an honest man ;" 
but this home-thrust is somehow ingeniously parried. The 
Apothecary and Pardoner fall to their narrative vein again ; and 
the latter tells a story of fetching a young woman from the lower 
world, from which I shall only give one specimen more as an 
instance of ludicrous and fantastic exaggeration. By the help 
of a passport from Lucifer, " given in the furnace of our palace," 
he obtains a safe conduct from one of the subordinate imps to 
his master's presence : 

" This devil and I walked arm in arm 
So far, till he had brought me thither, 
Where all the devils of hell together 
Stood in array in such apparel, 
As for that day there meetly fell. 
Their horns well gilt, their claws full clean, 
Their tails well kempt, and, as I ween, 
With sothery butter their bodies anointed; 
I never saw devils so well appointed. 
The master-devil sat in his jacket, 
And all the souls were playing at racket. 
None other rackets they had in hand, 
Save eveiy soul a good fire-brand ; 
Wherewith they play'd so prettily, 
That Lucifer laughed merrily. 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 121 

And all the residue of the fiends 
Did laugh thereat full well, like friends. 
But of my friend I saw no whit, 
Nor durst not ask for her as yet. 
Anon all this rout was brought in silence, 
And I by an usher brought to presence 
Of Lucifer ; then low, as well I could, 
I kneeled, which he so well allow'd 
That thus he beck'd, and by St. Antony 
He smiled on me well-favour'dly, 
Bending his brows as broad as barn-doors; 
Shaking his ears as rugged as burrs ; 
Rolling his eyes as round as two bushels; 
Flashing the fire out of his nostrils ; 
Gnashing his teeth so vain-gloriously. 
That methought time to fall to flattery, 
» Wherewith I told, as I shall tell ; 
Oh pleasant picture ! O prince of hell !" &c. 

The piece concludes with some good wholesome advice from 
the Pedlar, who here, as well as in the poem of the • Excursion,' 
performs the part of Old Morality ; but he does not seem, as in 
the latter case, to be acquainted with the " mighty stream of 
Tendency." He is more full of " wise saws" than " modern 
instances ;" as prosing, but less paradoxical ! 

" But where ye doubt, the truth not knowing, 
Believing the best, good may be growing. 
In judging the best, no harm at the least; 
In judging the worst, no good at the best. 
But best in these things, it seemeth to me, 
To make no judgment upon ye ; 
But as the church does judge or take them, 
So do ye receive or forsake them. 
And so be you sure you cannot err, 
But may be a fruitful follower." 

Nothing can be clearer than this. 

The ' Return from Parnassus' was "first publicly acted," as 
the title-page imports, " by the students in St. John's College, 
Cambridge." It is a very singular, a very ingenious, and, as I 
think, a very interesting performance. It contains criticisms on 
contemporary authors, strictures on living manners, and the 
earliest denunciation (I know of) of the miseries and unprofit- 
9 



122 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



ableness of a scholar's life. The only part I object to in our 
author's criticism is his abuse of Marston ; and that, not because 
he says what is severe, but because he says what is not true of 
him. Anther may sharpen our insight into men's defects ; but 
nothing should make us blind to their excellences. The whole 
passage is, however, so curious in itself (like the * Edinburgh 
Review' lately published for the year 1755) that I cannot forbear 
quoting a great part of it. We find in the list of candidates for 
praise many a name — 

" That like a trumpet makes the spirits dance;" 

there are others that have long since sunk to the bottom of the 
stream of time, and no Humane Society of Antiquarians and 
Critics is ever likely to fish them up again. 

" Judicio. Read the names. 

Ingenioso. So I will, if thou wilt help me to censure them. 
Edmund Spenser, John Davis, 

Henry Constable, John Marston, 

Thomas Lodge, Kit Marlowe, 

Samuel Daniel, William Shakspeare ; 

Thomas Watson, and one Churchyard, 

Michael Drayton, [who is consigned to an untimely grave.] 

Good men and true, stand together, hear your censure : what's thy judg- 
ment of Spenser 1 

Jud. A sweeter swan than ever sung in Po ; 
A shriller nightingale than ever blest 
The prouder groves of self admiring Rome, 
Blithe was each valley, and each shepherd proud, 
While he did chaunt his rural minstrelsy. 
Attentive was full many a dainty ear : 
Nay, hearers hung upon his melting tongue, 
While sweetly of his Faery Clueen he sung ; 
While to the water's fall he tun'd her fame, 
And in each bark engrav'd Eliza's ncune. 
And yet for all, this unregarding soil 
Unlaced the line of his desired life, 
Denying maintenance for his dear relief; 
Careless even to prevent his exequy, 
Scarce deigning to shut up his dying eye. 

Ing. Pity it is that gentler wits should breed, * 

Where thick-skinned chuffs laugh at a scholar's need. 
But softly may our honour'd ashes rest, 
That he by merry Chaucer's noble chest. 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 123 

But I pray thee proceed briefly in thy censure, that I may be proud of my- 
self, as in the first, so in the last, my censure may jump with thine. Henry 
Constable, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Watson. 

Jud. Sweet Constable doth take the wondering ear, 
And lays it up in willing prisonment : 
Sweet honey-dropping Daniel doth wage 
War with the proudest big Italian, 
That melts his heart in sugar'd sonnetting. 
Only let him more sparingly make use 
Of others' wit, and use his own the more. 
That well may scorn base imitation. 
For Lodge and Watson, men of som.e desert. 
Yet subject to a critic's marginal : 
Lodge for his oar in every paper boat, 
He that turns over Galen every day, 
To sit and simper Euphues' legacy. 

Ing. Michael Drayton. 

Jud. Drayton's sweet Muse is like a sanguine dye, 
Able to ravish the rash gazer's eye. 

Ing. However, he wants one true note of a poet of our times ; and that 
is this, he cannot swagger in a tavern, nor domineer in a pot-house. John 
Davis — 

Jud. Acute John Davis, I affect thy rhymes. 
That jerk in hidden charms these looser times : 
Thy plainer verse, thy unaffected vein, 
Is graced with a fair and sweeping train. 

Ing. John Marston — 

Jud. What, Monsieur Kinsayder, put up, man, put up for shame. 
Methinks he is a ruffian in his style, 
Withouten bands or garters' ornament. 
He quaffs a cup of Frenchman's helicon. 
Then royster doyster in his oily terms 
Cuts, thrusts, and foins at whomsoe'er he meets, 
And strews about Ram-alley meditations. 
Tut, what cares he for modest close-couch'd terms. 
Cleanly to gird our looser libertines '? 
Give him plain naked words stript from their shirts. 
That might beseem plain-dealing Aretine. 

Ing. Christopher Marlowe — 

Jud. Marlowe was happy in his buskin'd Muse : 
Alas 1 unhappy in his life and end. 
Pity it is that wit so ill should dwell, 
Wit lent from heaven, but vices sent from hell. 

Ing. Our theatre hath lost, Pluto hath got 
A tragic penman for a dreary plot. 
Benjamin Jonson — 

Jud. The wittiest fellow of a bricklayer in England. 



124 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



Ing. A mere empiric, one that gets what he hath by observation, and 
makes only nature privy to what he endites : so slow an inventor, that he 
were better betake himself to his old trade of bricklaying; a blood whoreson, 
as confident now in making of a book, as he was in times past in laying of 
a brick. 
William Shakspeare, 

Jud. Who loves Adonis' love, or Lucrece' rape, 
His sweeter verse contains heart-robbing life. 
Could but a graver subject him content, 
Without love's lazy foolish languishment." 

This passage might seem to ascertain the date of the piece, as it 
must be supposed to have been written before Shakspeare had 
become known as a dramatic poet. Yet he afterwards intro- 
duces Kempe the actor talking with Burbage, and saying, " Few 
(of the University) pens play well : they smell too much of that 
writer Ovid, and of that writer Metamorphosis, and talk too 
much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why, here's our fellow Shak- 
speare puts them all down ; ay, and Ben Jonson too." — There is 
a good deal of discontent in all this ; but the author complains 
of want of success in a former attempt, and appears not to have 
been on good* terms with fortune. The miseries of a poet's life 
forms one of the favourite topics of ' The Return from Parnas- 
sus,' and are treated as if by some one who had " felt them 
knowingly." Thus Philomusus and Studioso chaunt their griefs 
in concert. 

'' Phil. Bann'd be those hours, when 'mongst the learned throng, 
By Granta's muddy bank we whilom sung. 

Stud. Bann'd be that hill which learned wits adore, 
Where erst we spent our stock and little store. 

Phil. Bann'd be those musty mews, where we have spent 
Our youthful days in paled languishment. 

Stud. Bann'd be those cozening arts that wrought our woe, 
Making us wandering pilgrims to and fro. 

Phil. Curst be our thoughts whene'er they dream of hope; 
Bann'd be those haps that henceforth flatter us. 
When mischief dogs us still, and still for aye, 
From our first birth until our burying day. 
In our first gamesome age, our doting sires 
Carked and car'd to have us lettered : 
Sent us to Cambridge where our oil is spent: 
Us our kind college from the teat did tent. 
And forced us walk before we weaned were. 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 135 

From that time since wandered have we still 

In the wide world, urg'd by our forced will ; 

Nor ever have we huppy fortune tried ; 

Then why should hope with our rent state abide T' 

" Out of our proof we speak." — This sorry matter-of-fact re- 
trospect of the evils of a college life is very different from the 
hypothetical aspirations after its incommunicable blessings ex- 
pressed by a living writer of true genius and a lover of true 
learning, who does not seem to have been cured of the old-fash- 
ioned prejudice in favour of classic lore, two hundred years after 
its vanity and vexation of spirit had been denounced in ' The 
Return from Parnassus :' — 

" I was not trained in academic bowers ; 

And to those learned streams I nothing owe, 

Which copious from those fair twin founts do flow : 

Mine have been anything but studious hours. 

Yet can I fancy wandering 'mid thy towers. 

Myself a nursUng, Granta, of thy lap. 

My brow seems tightening with the Doctor's cap ; 

And I walk gowned ; feel unusual powers. 

Strange forms of logic clothe my admiring speech ; 

Old Ramus' ghost is busy at my brain. 

And my skull teems with notions infinite: 

Be still, ye reeds of Camus, while I teach 

Truths which transcend the searching schoolmen's vein ; 

And half had stagger'd that stout Stagyrite."* 

Thus it is that our treasure always lies where our knowledge 
does not, and fortunately enough perhaps; for the empire of 
imagination is wider and more prolific than that of experience. 

The author of the old play, whoever he was, appears to have 
belonged to that class of mortals, who, as Fielding has it, feed 
upon their own hearts ; who are egotists the wrong way, made 
desperate by too quick a sense of constant infelicity ; and have 
the same intense uneasy consciousness of their own defects that 
most men have self-complacency in their supposed advantages. 
Thus venting the driblets of his spleen still upon himself, he 
prompts the Page to say, " A mere scholar is a creature that can 
strike fire in the morning at his tinder-box, put on a pair of lined 

* ' Sonnet to Cambridge,' by Charles Lamb 



126 THE AGE OP ELIZABETH. 

slippers, sit rheuming till dinner, and then go to his meat when 
the bell rings ; one that hath a peculiar gift in a cough, and a 
license to spit : or if you will have him defined by negatives, he 
is one that cannot make a good leg, one that cannot eat a mess 
of broth cleanly, one that cannot ride a horse without spur-gall- 
ing, one that cannot salute a woman and look on her directly, 

one that cannot " 

If I was not afraid of being tedious, I might here give the 
examination of Signor Immerito, a raw ignorant clown (whose 
father has purchased him a living,) by Sir Roderick and the Re- 
corder, which throws a considerable light on the state of wit and 
humour, as well as of ecclesiastical patronage in the reign of 
Elizabeth. It is to be recollected that one of the titles of this 
play is " A Scourge for Simony.' 

Rec. For as much as nature has done her part in making you a handsome 
likely man — in the next place some art is requisite for the perfection of na- 
ture : for the trial whereof, at the request of my worshipful friend, I will in 
some sort propound questions fit to be resolved by one of your profession. 
Say what is a person that was never at the university 1 

Im. A person that was never in the university, is a living creature that can 
eat a tythe pig, 

Rec. Very well answered: but you should have added — and must be offici- 
ous to his patron. Write down that answer, to shew his learning in logic. 

Sir Rod. Yea, boy, write that down : very learnedly, in good faith. I pray 
now let me ask you one question that I remember, whether is the^asculine 
gender or the feminine more worthy % 

Jm. The feminine, sir. 

Sir Rod. The right answer, the right answer. In good faith, I have been 
of that mind always: write, boy, that, to shew he is a grammarian. 

Rec. What university are you of? 

Im. Of none. 

Sir Rod. He tells truth : to tell truth is an excellent virtue : boy, make two 
heads, one for his learning, another for his virtues, and refer this to the head 
of his virtues, not of nis learning. Now, Master Recorder, if it please you, I 
will examine him in an author, that will sound him to the depth ; a book of 
astronomy, otherwise called an almanack. 

Rec. Very good, Sir Roderick ; it were to be wished there were no other 
book of humanity; then there would not be such busy state-prying fellows as 
are now a-days. Proceed, good sir. 

Sir Rod. What is the dominical letter 1 

Im. C, sir, and please your worship. 

Sir Rod. A very good answer, a very good answer, the very answer of the 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 127 

book. Write down that, and refer it to his skill in philosophy. How many 
days hath September'? 

Im. Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November, February 
hath twenty-eight alone, and all the rest hath thirty and one. 

Sir Rod. Very learnedly, in good faith: he hath also a smack in poetry. 
Write down that, boy, to show his learning in poetry. How many miles from 
Waltham to London '? 

Im. Twelve, sir. 

Sir Rod. How many from Newmarket to Grantham 1 

Im. Ten, sir. 

Sir Rod. Write down that answer of his, to show his learning in arith- 
metic. 

Page. He must needs be a good arithmetician that counted [out] money 
so lately. 

Sir Rod. When is the new moon 1 

Im. The last quarter, the fifth day, at two of the clock, and thirty-eight 
minutes, in the morning. 

Sir Rod. How call you him that is weather-wise 1 

Rec. A good astronomer. 

Sir Rod. Sirrah, boy, write him down for a good astronomer. What day 
of the month lights the queen's day on'^ 

Im. The 17th of November. 

Sir Rod. Boy, refer this to his virtues, and write him down a good sub- 
ject. 

Page. Faith, he were an excellent subject for two or three good wits; he 
would make a fine ass for an ape to ride upon. 

Sir Rod. And these shall suffice for the parts of his learning. Now it re- 
mains to try, whether you be a man of a good utterance, that is, whether you 
can ask for the strayed heifer with the white face, as also chide the boys in the 
belfry, and bid the sexton whip out the dogs : let me hear your voice. 

Im. If any man or woman — 

Sir Rod. That's too high. 

Im. If any man or woman. 

Sir Rod. That's too low. 

Im. If any man or woman can tell any tidinfs of a horse with four feet, 
two ears, that did stray about the seventh hour, tliree minutes in the forenoon, 
the fifth day— 

Sir Rod. Boy, write him down for a good utterance. Master Recorder, I 
think he hath been examined sufficiently. 

Rec. Ay, Sir Roderick, 'tis so : we have tried him very thoroughly. 

Page. Ay, we have taken an inventory of his good parts, and prized them 
accordingly. 

Sir Rod. Signior Immerito, forasmuch as we have made a double trial of 
thee, the one of your learning, the other of your erudition ; it is expedient, also, 
in the next place, to give you a few exhortations, considering the greatest 
clerks are not the wisest men : this is therefore first to exhort you to abstain 



128 THE AGE OF- ELIZABETH. 

from controversies; secondly, not to gird at men of worship, such as myself, 
but to use yourself discreetly ; thirdly, not to speak when any man or woman 
coughs : do so, and in so doing, I will persevere to be your worshipful friend 
and loving pati-on. Lead Immerito in to my son, and let him despatch him, 
and remember my tythes to be reserved, paying twelve-pence a-year. 

' Gammer Gurton's Needle'* is a still older and more curious 
relic ; and is a regular comedy in five acts, built on the circum- 
stance of an old woman having lost her needle, which throws the 
whole village into confusion, till it is at last providentially found 
sticking in an unlucky part of Hodge's dress. This must evi- 
dently have happened at a time when the manufacturers of Shef- 
field and Birmingham had not reached the height of perfection 
which they have at present done. Suppose that there is only 
one sewing-needle in a parish, that the owner, a diligent, notable 
old dame, loses it, that a mischief-making wag sets it about that 
another old woman has stolen this valuable instrument of house- 
hold industry, that strict search is made everywhere in-doors for 
it in vain, and that then the incensed parties sally forth to scold 
it out in the open air, till words end in blows, and the affair is 
referred over to the higher authorities, and we shall have an 
exact idea (though perhaps not so lively a one) of what passes 
in this authentic document between Gammer Gurton and her 
Gossip Dame Chat, Diccon the Bedlam (the causer of these 
harms), Hodge, Gammer Gurton's servant, Tyb, her maid, Cocke, 
her 'prentice boy, Doll, Scapethrift, Master Baillie, his master, 
Doctor Rat, the curate, and Gib the Cat, who may be fairly 
reckoned one of the dramatis personcs, and performs no mean 
part. 

" Gog's crosse. Gammer" (says Cocke, the boyj, "if ye will laugh, look m 

but at the door. 
And see how Hodge lieth tumbling and tossing amidst the floor. 
Raking there some fire to find among the ashes deadt 
Where there is not a spark so big as a pin's head : 
At last in a dark corner two sparks he thought he sees. 
Which were indeed nought else but Gib our cat's two eyes, 

* The name of Still has been assigned as the author of this singular produc- 
tion, with the date of 1566. 

t That is, to light a candle to look for the lost needle. 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 129 

PufF, quoth Hodge ; thinking thereby to have fire without doubt ; 

With that Gib shut her two eyes, and so the fire was out ; 

And by and by them opened, even as they were before. 

With that the sparks appeared, even as they had done of yore; 

And even as Hodge blew the fire, as he did think, 

Gib, as he felt the blast, straightway began to wink ; 

Till Hodge fell of swearing, as came best to his turn; 

The fire was sure bewitch'd, and therefore would not burn. 

At last Gib up the stairs, among old posts and pins. 

And Hodge he hied him after, till broke were both his shins; 

Cursing and swearing oaths, were never of his making. 

That Gib would fire the house, if that she were not taken." 

Diccon, the strolling beggar (or Bedlam, as he is called,) steals 
a piece of bacon from behind Gammer Gurton's door, and in an- 
swer to Hodge's complaint of being dreadfully pinched for hun- 
ger, asks — 

"Why, Hodge, was there none at hopae thy dinner for to set"? 

Hodge. Gog's bread, Diccon, I came too late, was nothing there to get: 
Gib (a foul fiend might on her light) lik'd the milk-pan so clean: 
See, Diccon, 'twas not so well washed this seven year I ween. 
A pestilence light on all ill luck, I had thought yet for all this. 
Of a morsel of bacon behind the door, at worst I should not miss: 
But when I sought a slip to cut, as I was wont to do, 
Gog's souls, Diccon, Gib our cat had eat the bacon too." 

Hodge's difficulty in making Diccon understand what the nee- 
dle is which his dame has lost, shows his superior acquaintance 
with the conveniences and modes of abridCTinjr labour in more 
civilized life, of which the other had no idea. 

" Hodge. Has she not gone, trowest now thou, and lost her neele *?" [So 

it is called here.] 
^^ Die. {sails staring.) Her eel, Hodge'? Who fished of late'? That was 

a dainty dish. 
Hodge. Tush, tush, her neele, her neele, her neele, man, 'tis neither flesh 
nor fish : 
A little thing with a hole in the end, as bright as any siller [silver], 
Small, long, sharp at the point, and strait as any pillar. 

Die. I know not what a devil thou mean'st, thou bring'st me more in 

doubt. 
Hodge, {answers itrith disdain). Know'st not with what Tom tailor's man 
sits broching through a clout"? 
A neele, a neele, my Gammer's neele is gone." 



130 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



The rogue Diccon threateus to show Hodge a spirit; but 
though Hodge runs away through pure fear before it has time to 
appear, he does not fail, in the true spirit of credulity, to give a 
faithful and alarming account of what he did not see to his mis- 
tress, concluding with a hit at the Popish clergy. 

" By the mass, I saw him of late call up a great black devil. 

Oh, the knave cried, ho, ho, he roared and thunder'd; 

And ye had been there, I am sure, you'd murrainly ha' wonder'd. 
Gam. Wast not thou afraid, Hodge, to see him in his place 1 
Hodge, {lies and says). No and he had come to me, should have laid him 
on his face, 

Should have promised him. 

Gam. But, Hodge, had he no horns to push 1 

Hodge. As long as your two arms. Saw ye never Friar Rush, 

Painted on a cloth, with a fine long cow's tail, 

And crooked cloven feet, and many a hooked nail 1 

For all the world (if I should judge) should reckon him his brother : 

Look even what face Friar Rush had, the devil had such another." 

He then adds (quite apocryphally) while he is in for it, that " the 
devil said plainly that Dame Chat had got the needle," which 
makes all the disturbance. The same play contains the well- 
known good old song, beginning and ending — 

" Back and side go bare, go bare, 
Both foot and hand go cold : 
But belly, God send thee good ale enough, 
Whether it be new or old, 
I cannot eat but little meat. 
My stomach is not good ; 
But sure I think, that I can drink 
With him that wears a hood: 
Though I go bare, take ye no care ; 
I nothing am a-cold : 
I stuff my skin so full within 
Of jolly good ale and old. 
Back and side go bare, &c. 

I love no roast, but a nut-brown toast, 

And a crab laid in the fire: 

A little bread, shall do me stead, 

Much bread I do not desire. 

No frost or show, no wind I trow, 

Can hurt me if I wolde, 

I am so wrapt, and thoroughly lapt 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 131 

In jolly good ale and old. 
Back and side go bare, &c 

And Tib, my wife, that as her liie 
Loveth well good ale to seek ; 
Full oft drinks she, till ye may see 
The tears run down her cheek 
Then doth she troll to me the bowl, 
Even as a malt-worm sholde : 
And saith, sweetheart, I took my part 
Of this jolly good ale and old. 

Back and side go bai-e, go bare. 

Both foot and hand go cold: 

But belly, God send thee good ale enough, 

Whether it be new or old. 

Such was the wit, such was the mirth of our ancestors : — 
homely, but hearty ; coarse perhaps, but kindly. Let no man 
despise it, for "Evil to him that evil thinks." To think it poor 
and beneath notice because it is not just like ours, is the same 
sort of hypercriticism that was exercised by the person who re- 
fused to read some old books, because they were " such very 
poor spelling." The meagreness of their literary or their bodily 
fare was at least relished by themselves ; and this is better than 
a surfeit or an indigestion. It is refreshing to look out of our- 
selves sometimes, not to be always holding the glass to our own 
peerless perfections ; and as there is a dead wall which always 
intercepts the prospect of the future from our view, (all that we 
can see beyond it is the heavens,) it is as well to direct our eyes 
now and then without scorn to the page of histgry, and repulsed 
in our attempts to penetrate the secrets of the next six thousand 
years, not to turn our backs on auld lang syne ! 

The othe r detached plays of nearly the same period of which 
I proposed to give a cursory account, are ' Green's Tu Quoque,' 
* Microcosmus,' 'Lingua,' 'The Merry Devil of Edmonton,' 
' The Pinner of Wakefield,' and ' The Spanish Tragedy.' Of 
the spurious plays attributed to Shakspeare, and to be found in 
some of the editions of his works, such as ' The Yorkshire Tra- 
gedy,' ' Sir John Oldcastle,' ' The Widow of Watling Street,' 
(fee, I shall say nothing here, because I suppose the reader to 
be already acquainted with them, and because I have given a 
general account of them in another work. 



132 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

' Green's Tu Quoque,' by George Cook, a coniemporary of 
Shakspeare's, is so called from Green the actor, who played the 
part of Bubble in this very lively and elegant comedy, with the 
cant phrase of Tu qiwqiie perpetually in his mouth. The double 
change of situation between this fellow and his master, Staines, 
leach passing from poverty to wealth, and from wealth to poverty 
again, is equally well imagined and executed. A gay and gal- 
lant spirit pervades the whole of it ; wit, poetry, and morality, 
each take their turn in it. The characters of the two sisters, 
Joyce and Gertrude, are very skilfully contrasted, and the man- 
ner in which they mutually betray one another into the hands of 
their lovers, first in the spirit of mischief, and afterwards of re- 
taliation, is quite dramatic. " If you cannot find in your heart 
to tell him you love him, I'll sigh it out for you. Come, we 
little creatures must help one another," says the Madcap to the 
Madonna. As to style and matter, this play has a number of 
pigeon-holes full of wit and epigrams which are flying out in 
almost every sentence. I could give twenty pointed conceits, 
wrapped up in good set terms. Let one or two at the utmost 
suffice. A bad hand at cards is thus described. Will Rash 
says to Scattergood, " Thou hast a wild hand indeed ; thy small 
cards show like a troop of rebels, and the knave of clubs is their 
chief leader." Bubble expresses a truism very gaily on finding 
himself. equipped like a gallant — "How apparel makes a man 
respected ! The very children in the street do adore me." We 
find here the first mention of Sir John Suckling's "melancholy 
hat," as a common article of wear — the same which he chose to 
clap on Ford's head, and the first instance of the theatrical 
double entendre which has been repeated ever since of an actor's 
ironically abusing himself in his feigned character. 

" Gervase. They say Green's a good clown. 
Bubble, (played bij Green, says) Green ! Green's an ass, 
Scattergood. Wherefore do you say so 1 

Bub. Indeed, I ha' no reason ; for they say he's as like me as ever he can 
look." 

The following description of the dissipation of a fortune in the 
hands of a spendthrift is ingenious and beautiful : 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 133 

" Know that which made him gracious in your eyes, 
And gilded o'er his imperfections, 
Is wasted and consumed even like ice. 
Which by the vehemence of heat dissolves, 
And glides to many rivers : so his wealth, 
That felt a prodigal hand, hot in expense, 
Melted within his gripe, and from his coffers 
Ran like a violent stream to other men's." 

* Microcosmus,' by Thomas Nabbes, is a dramatic mask or 
allegory, in which the Senses, the Soul, a Good and a Bad Ge- 
nius, Conscience, &;c., contend for the dominion of a man ; and 
notwithstanding the awkwardness of the machinery, is not without 
poetry, elegance, and originality. Take the description of morn- 
ing as a proof : 

" What do I see 1 Blush, grey-eyed mom, and spread 
Thy purple shame upon the mountain tops; 
Or pale thyself with envy, since here comes 
A brighter Venus than the dull-eyed star 
That lights thee up." 

But what are we to think of a play, of which the following is 
a literal list of the dramatis persona ? 

"Nature, a fair woman, in a white robe, wrought with birds, beasts, fruits, flowers, 

clouds, stars, &cc. ; on her head a wreath of flowers interwoven with stars. 
Janus, a man with two faces, signifying Providence, in a yellow robe, wrought 

with snakes, as he is deus anni : on his head a crown. He is Nature's husband. 
Fire, a fierce-countenanced young man, in a flame-coloured robe, wrought 

with gleams of fire ; his hair red, and on his head a crown of flames, HLs 

creature a Vulcan. 
Air, a young man of a variable countenance, in a blue robe, wrought with 

divers coloured clouds ; his hair blue ; and on his head a wreath of clouds. 

His creature a giant or silvan. 
Water, a young woman in a sea-greeen robe, wrought with waves ; her hair 

a sea-green, and on her head a wreath of sedge bound about with waves. 

Her creature a syren. 
Earth, a young woman of a sad countenance, in a grass-green robe, wrought 

with sundry fruits and flowers ; her hair black, and on her head a chaplet 

of flowers. Her creature a pigmy. 
Love, a Cupid in a flame-coloured habit; bow and quiver, a crown of flaming 

hearts, &c. 
Physander, a perfect grown man, in a long white robe, and on his head a 

garland of white lilies and roses mixed. His name duo r^j ^vacos kuI tS dvBpos. 



134 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

Choler, a fencer; his clothes red. 

Blood, a dancer, in a watchet-coloured suit. 

Phlegm, a physician, an old man ; his doublet white and black; trunk hose. 

Melancholy, a musician; his complexion, hair, and clothes black; a lute in 
his hand. He is likewise an amorist. 

Bellanmma, a lovely woman, in a long white robe; on her head a wreath of 
white flowers. She signifies the soul. 

Bonus Genius, an angel, in a like white robe; wings and wreath white. 

Malus Geniu.'?, a devil, in a black robe; hair, wreath, and wings black. 

The Five Senses — Seeing, a chambermaid; Hearing, the usher of the hall; 
Smelling, a huntsman or gardener; Tasting, a cook; Touching, a gentle- 
man usher. 

Sensuality, a wanton woman, richly habited, but lasciviously dressed, &c. 

Temperance, a lovely woman, of a modest countenance; her garments plain, 
but decent, &c. 

A Philosopher, ^ 

An Eremite, I „ i i, u-. j 

-Til 1 r all properly habited. 

A Ploughman, | i f J 

A Shepherd, J 

Three Furies as they are commonly fancied. 

Fear, the crier of the court, with a tipstaff. 

Conscience, the Ju.dge of the court. 

Hope and Despair, an advocate and a lawyer. 

The other three Virtues, as they are frequently expressed by painters. 

The Heroes, in bright antique habits, &cc. 

The front of a workmanship proper to the fancy of the rest, adorned with brass 
figures of angels and devils, with several inscriptions ; the title is an escutcheon, 
supported by an angel and a devil. Within the arch a continuing perspec- 
tive of ruins, which is drawn still before the other scenes, whilst they are 
varied. 

THE INSCRIPTIONS. 

Hinc gloria. Hinc poena. 

Appetitus boni. Appetitus mali." 

Antony Brewer's ' Lingua' (1607) is of the same cast. It is 
much longer as well as older than ' Microcosmus.' It is also an 
allegory celebrating the contention of the Five Senses for the 
crown of superiority, and the pretensions of Lingua, or the 
Tongue, to be admitted as a sixth sense. It is full of child's 
play, and old wives' tales ; but is not unadorned with passages 
displaying strong good sense, and powers of fantastic description. 

Mr. Lamb has quoted two passages from it — the admirable 
enumeration of the characteristics of different languages, ' The 
Chaldee wise, the Arabian physical,' &;c. ; and the striking de- 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 135 

scription of the ornaments and uses of tragedy and comedy. The 
dialogue between Memory, Common Sense, and Phantastes, is 
curious and worth considering : 

" Common Sense. Why, good father, why are you so late now-a-daysl 

Memory. Thus 'tis ; the most customers 1 remember myself to have, are, 
as your lordship knows, scholars, and now-a-days the most of them are become 
critics, bringing me home such paltry things to lay up for them, that I can 
hardly find them again. 

Phantasies. Jupiter, Jupiter, I had thought these flies had bit none but my- 
self; do critics tickle you, i' faith '? 

Mem. Very familiarly; for they must know of me, forsooth, how every idle 
word is written in all the musty moth-eaten manuscripts, kept in all the old 
libraries in every city, betwixt England and Peru. 

Comvion Sense. Indeed I have noted these times to affect antiquities more 
than is requisite. 

Mem. I remember in the age of Assaracus and Ninus, and about the wars 
of Thebes, and the siege of Troy, there were few things committed to my 
charge, but those that were well worthy the preserving; but now every trifle 
must be wrapp'd up in the volume of eternity. A rich pudding-wife, or a 
cobbler, cannot die but I must immortalize his name with an epitaph ; a dog 
cannot water in a nobleman's shoe, but it must be sprinkled into the chronicles ; 
so that I never could remember my treasure more full, and never emptier of 
honourable and true heroical actions." 

And again, Mendacio put in his claim with great success to 
many works of uncommon merit : 

" Appe. Thou boy ! how is this possible 1 Thou art but a child, and there 
were sects of philosophy before thou wert born. 

Men. Appetitus, thou mistakest me ; I tell thee, three thousand years ago 
was Mendacio born in Greece, nursed in Crete, and ever since honoured 
every where: I'll be sworn I held old Homer's pen when he writ his Iliads 
and his Odysseys. 

Appe. Thou hadst need, for I hear say he was blind. 

Men. I helped Herodotus to pen some part of his Muses ; lent Pliny ink 
to write his history ; rounded Rabelais in the ear when he historified Panta- 
gruel ; as for Lucian, I was his genius. O, those two books, ' De Vera Histo- 
ria,' however they go under his name, I'll be sworn I writ them every tittle. 

Appe. Sure as I am hungry, thou'lt have it for lying. But hast thou rusted 
this latter time for want of exercise 1 

Men. Nothing less. I must confess I would fain have jogged Stow and 
great HoUingshed on their elbows, when they were about their Chronicles; 
and, as I remember, Sir John Mandevill's Travels, and a great part of the 
' Decades," were of my doing ; but for the * Mirror of Knighthood,' ' Bevis of 
Southampton/ ' Palmerin of England,' ' Amadis of Gaul,' ' Huon de Bor- 



136 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

deaux/ ' Sir Guy of Warwick,' 'Martin Marprelate,' 'Robin Hood,' 'Ga- 
ragantua,' ' Gerilion,' and a thousand such exquisite monuments as tliese, no 
doubt but they breathe in my breath up and down." 

' The Merry Devil of Edmonton,' which has been sometimes 
attributed to Shakspeare, is assuredly not unworthy of him. It 
is more likely, however, both from the style and subject matter, 
to have been Heywood's than any other person's. It is perhaps 
the first example of sentimental comedy we have — romantic, 
sAi^et, tender, it expresses the feelings of honour, love, and friend- 
ship in their utmost delicacy, enthusiasm, and purity. The 
names alone, Raymond Mounchersey, Frank Jerningham, Clare, 
Millisent, " sound silver sweet, like lovers' tongues by night." 
It sets out with a sort of story of Doctor Faustus, but this is 
dropt as jarring on the tender chords of the rest of the piece. 
The wit of ' The Merry Devil of Edmonton' is as genuine as 
the poetry. Mine Host of the George is as good a fellow as Boni- 
face, and the deer-stealing scenes in the forest between him, Sir 
John the curate. Smug the smith, and Banks the miller, are 
" very honest knaveries," as Sir Hugh Evans has it. The air 
is delicate, and the deer, shot by their cross-bows, fall without a 
groan ! Frank Jerningham says to Clare, 

" The way lies right : hark, the clock strikes at Enfield : what's the hour 1 

Young Clare. Ten, the bell says. 

Jem. It was but eight when we set out from Cheston : Sir John and his 
sexton are at their ale to-night, the clock runs at random. 

Y. Clare. Nay, as sure as thou livest, the villanous vicar is abroad in the 
chase. The priest steals more venison than half the country. 

Jem. Millisent, how dost thou 1 

Mil. Sir, very well, 
I would to God we were at Brian's lodge." 

A volume might be written to prove this last answer Shak- 
speare's, in which the tongue says one thing in one line, and the 
heart contradicts it in the next ; but there were other writers 
living in the time of Shakspeare, who knew these subtle wind- 
ings of the passions besides him, — though none so well as he ! 

* The Pinner of Wakefield, or George a Green,' is a pleasant 
interlude, of an early date, and the author unknown, in which 
kings and cobblers, outlaws and Maid Marians, are " hail-fellow 



ON SINGLE PLAYS, POEMS, ETC. 137 

well met," and in which the features of the antique world are 
made smiling and amiable enough. Jenkin, George a Green's 
servant, is a notorious wag. Here is one of his pretended 
pranks : 

" Jenkin. This fellow comes to me, 
And takes me by the bosom : you slave, 
Said he, hoLl my horse, and look 
He takes no cold in his feet. 
No, marry shall he, sir, quoth I. 
I'll lay my cloak underneath him, 
I took my cloak, spread it all along, 
And his horse on the midst of it. 

George. Thou clown, did'st thou set his horse upon thy cloak 1 

Jenk. Aye, but mark how I served him. 
Madge and he was no sooner gone down into the ditch 
But I plucked out my knife, cut four holes in my cloak, and made his horse 
stand on the bare ground." 

The first part of ' Jeronymo' is an indifferent piece of work, 
and the second, or * The Spanish Tragedy,' by Kyd, is like unto 
it, except the interpolations idly said to have been added by Ben 
Jonson, relating to Jeronymo's phrensy, " which have all the 
melancholy madness of poetry, if not the inspiration." 

10 



138 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



LECTURE VI. 

On Miscellaneous Poems; F. Beaumont, P. Fletcher, Drayton, Daniel, etc.; 

Sir P. Sidney's ' Arcadia,' and other works. 

I SHALL, in the present Lecture, attempt to give some idea of the 
lighter productions of the Muse in the period before us, in order 
to show that grace and elegance are not confined entirely to 
later times, and shall conclude with some remarks on Sir Philip 
Sidney's' Arcadia.' 

I have already made mention of the lyrical pieces of Beau- 
mont and Fletcher. It appears from his poems, that many of 
these were composed by Francis Beaumont, particularly the very 
beautiful ones in the tragedy of ' The False One,' the ' Praise 
of Love' in that of ' Valentinian,' and another in ' The Nice 
Valour, or Passionate Madman,' an " Address to Melancholy,'* 
which is the perfection of this kind of writing. 

" Hence, all you vain delights , 

As short as are the nights 

Wherein you spend your folly 

There's nought in this life sweet. 

If man were wise to see't, 

But only melancholy, 

Oh, sweetest melancholy, 

Welcome folded arms and fixed eyes, 

A sight that piercing mortifies ; 

A look that's fasten'd to the ground, 

A tongue chain'd up without a sound ; 

Fountain heads, and pathless groves, 

Places which pale passion loves : 

Moon-light walks, where all the fowls 

Are warmly hous'd, save bats and owls; 

A midnight bell, a passing groan. 

These are the sounds we feed upon: 

Then stretch our bones in a siill, gloomy valley; 

Nothing so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy." 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 139 

It has been supposed (and not without every appearance of 
good reason) that this pensive strain, " most musical, most me- 
lancholy," gave the first suggestion of the spirited introduction 
to Milton's ' II Penseroso.' 

" Hence, vain deluding joys, * 

The brood of folly without father bred! 

But hail, thou Goddess, sage and holy, 

Hail, divinest melancholy, 

Whose saintly visage is too bright 

To hit the sense of human sight," &c. 

The same writer thus moralises on the hTe of man, in a set of 
similes, as apposite as they are light and elegant : 

" Like to the falling of a star. 
Or as the flights of eagles .ire, 
Or like the fresh spring's gaudy hue, 
Or silver drops of morning dew^. 
Or like a wind that chafes the flood, 
Or bubbles which on water stood : 
E'en such is man, whose borrow'd light 
Is straight call'd in and paid to-night:— 
The wind blows out, the bubble dies : 
The spring eniomb'd in autumn lies; 
The dew's dried up, the star is shot. 
The flight is past, and man forgot." 

" The silver foam which the wind severs from the parted 
wave" is not more light or sparkling than this : the dove's downy 
pinion is not softer and smoother than the verse. We are too 
ready to conceive of the ,poetry of that day, as altogether old- 
fashioned, meagre, squalid, deformed, withered and wild in its 
attire, or as a sort of uncouth monster, like " grim-visaged, com- 
fortless despair," mounted on a lumbering, unmanageable Pe- 
gasus, dragon-winged and leaden-hoofed ; but it as often wore 
a syJph-like form with Attic vest, with fairy feet, and the but- 
terfly's gaudy wings. The bees were said to have come, and 
built their hive in the mouth of Plato when a child ; and the 
fable might be transferred to the sweeter accents of Beaumont 
and Fletcher! Beaumont died at the age of five-and-twenty. 
One of these writers makes Bellario the Page say to Philaster, 
who threatens to take his life — 



140 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

" 'Tis not a life ; 
'Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away." 

But here was youth, genius, aspiring hope, growing reputation, 
cut off like a flower in its summer-pride, or like " the lily on its 
iSlalk green," which makes us repine at fortune and almost at 
nature, that seems to set so little store by their greatest favour- 
ites. The life of poets is, or ought to be (judging of it from the 
light it lendsi to ours,) a golden dream, full of brightness and 
sweetness, " lapt in Elysium ;" and it gives one a reluctant pang 
to see the splendid vision, by which they are attended in their 
path of glory, fade like a vapour, and their sacred heads laid 
low in ashes, before the sand of common mortals has run out. 
Fletcher too was prematurely cut off by the plague. Raphael 
died at four-and-thirty, and Correggio at forty. Who can help 
wishing that they had lived to the age of Michael Angelo and 
Titian ? Shakspeare might have lived another half century, en- 
joying fame and repose, " now that his task was smoothly done," 
listening to the music of his name, and better still, of his own 
thoughts, without minding Rym^r's abuse of " the tragedies of 
the last age." His native stream of Avon would then have 
flowed with softer murmurs to the ear, and his pleasant birth- 
place, Stratford, would in that case havQ worn even a more glad- 
some smile than it does, to the eye of fancy ! — Poets, however, 
'liave a sort of privileged after-life, which does not fall to the 
common lot ; the rich and mighty are nothing but while they are 
living ; their power ceases with them : but " the sons of me- 
mory, the great heirs of fame," leave" the best part of what was 
theirs, their thoughts, their verse, what they most delighted and 
prided themselves in, behind them — imperishable, incorruptible, 
immortal ! — Sir John Beaumont (the brother of our drt^matist), 
whose loyal and religious effusions are not worth mucK, very 
'feelingly laments his brother's untimely death in an epitaph upon 
lim : 

" Thou shouldst have followed me, but Death (to blame) 
Miscounted years, and measured age by fame ; 
So dearly hasi thou bou;>ht thy precious lines, 
Their praise grew swiftly j so tliy life declines, 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. Ui 



Thy Muse, the hearer's Queen, the readers Love, 

All ears, all hearts (but Death's) could please and move." 

Beaumont's verses addressed to Ben Jonson at the Mermaid 
are a pleasing record of their friendship, and of the way in which 
they " fleeted the time carelessly" as well as studiously "in the 
golden age" of our poetry : 

[Lines sent from the country with two unfinished Comedies, which deferred tkeir 
merry meetings at the Mermaid.] 

" The sun which doth the greatest comfort bring 

To absent friends, because the selfsame thing 

They know they see, however absent, is 

Here our best hay-maker, (forgive me this, 

It is our country style) in this warm shine 

I lie and dream of your full Mermaid wine : 

Oh, we have water mixt with claret lees, 

Drink apt to bring in diier heresies 

Than here, good only for the sonnet's strain, 

With fustian metaphors to stuff the brain : 

Think with one draught a man's invention fades, 

Two cups had quite spoil'd Homer's Iliads. 

'Tis liquor that will find out Sutcliffe's wit. 

Like where he will, and make him write worse yet : 

Fill'd with such moisture, in most grievous qualms* 

Did Robert Wisdom write his singing psalms: 

And so must I do this : and yet I think 

It is a potion sent us down to drink 

By special providence, keep us from fights, 

Make us not laugh when we make legs to knights; 

'Tis this that keeps our minds fit for our states, 

A medicine to obey our magistrates. 

******** 

Methinks the little wit I had is lost 

Since I saw you, for wit is like a rest 

Held up at tennis, which men do the best 

With the best gamesters. What things have we seen 

Done at the Mermaid ! Hard words that have been 

So nimble, and so full of subtile flame, 

As if that every one from whence they came 

Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, 

And had resolved to live a fool the rest ,. 

* So in Rochester's epigram : — 

" Slernhold and Hopkins had great qualms, 

Whea they translated David's Psalms." . ; 



142 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

Of his dull life ; then v;lien there hath been thrown 

Wit able enough to justify the town 

For three days past, wit that might warrant be 

For the whole city to talk foolishly, 

Till that were cancell'd; and when that was gone, 

We left an air behind us, which alone 

Was able to make the two next companies 

Right witty, though but downright fools more wise." 

I shall not in this place repeat Marlowe's celebrated song, 
*Come live with me and be my love,' nor Sir Walter Raleigh's 
no less celebrated answer to it (they may both be found in Wal- 
ton's ' Complete Angler,' accompanied with scenery and remarks 
worthy of them) ,• but I may quote, as a specimen of the high 
and romantic tone in which the poets of this age thought and 
spoke of each other, the ' Vision upon the Conceipt of the Faery 
Queen,' understood to be by Sir Walter Releigh : 

" Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay, 
Within that temple, where the vestal flame 
Was wont to burn, and passing by that way 
To see that buried dust of living fame. 
Whose tomb fair Love, and fairer Virtue kept. 
All suddenly I saw the Faery Glueen : 
At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept; 
And from thenceforth those Graces were not seen, 
For they this Glueen attended, in whose stead 
Oblivion laid him down on Laura's hearse. 
Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed, 
And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did pierce, 
Where Homer's spright did tremble all for grief, 
And curst th' access of that celestial thief." 

A higher strain of compliment cannot well be conceived than 
this, which raises your idea even of that which it disparages in 
the comparison, and makes you feel that nothing could have torn 
the writer from his idolatrous enthusiasm for Petrarch and his 
Laura's tomb, but Spenser's magic verses and diviner ' Faery 
Queen' — the one lifted above mortality, the other brought from 
the skies ! 

The name of Drummond of Hawthornden is in a manner en- 
twined in cypher with that of Ben Jonson. He has not done 
himself or Jonson any credit by his account of their con versa- 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 143 

I 

tion ; but his sonnets are in the highest degree elegant, harmo- 
nious, and striking. It appears to me that they are more in the 
manner of Petrarch than any others that we have, with a certain 
intenseness in the sentiment, an occasional glitter of thought, and 
uniform terseness of expression. The reader may judge for him- 
self from a few examples. 

" I know that all beneath the moon decays, 
And what by mortals in this world is wrought 
In time's great periods shall return to nought; 
That fairest states have fatal nights and days. 
I know that all the Muse's heavenly lays, 
With toil of spright which are so dearly bought, 
As idle sounds, of few or none are sought ; 
That there is nothing lighter than vain praise. 
I know frail beauty's like the purple flow'r. 
To which one morn oft birth and death affords; 
That love a jarring is of mind's accords, 
Where sense and will bring under reason's pow'r. 
Know what I list, this all cannot me move, 
But that, alas ! I both must write and love." 

Another — 

"Fair moon, who with thy cold and silver shine 
Mak'st sweet the horror of the dreadful night, 
Delighting the weak eye with smiles divine, 
Which Phoebus dazzles with his too much light; 
Bright queen of the first Heav'n, if in thy shrine 
By turning oft, and Heav'n's eternal might. 
Thou hast not yet that once sweet fire of thine, 
Endymion, forgot, and lovers' plight: 
If cause like thine may pity breed in thee, 
And pity somewhat else to it obtain. 
Since thou hast power of dreams as well as he 
That holds the golden rod and m.ortal chain ; 
Now while she sleeps,* in doleful guise her show 
These tears, and the black map of all my woe." 

This is the eleventh sonnet : the twelfth is full of vile and 
forced conceits, without any sentiment at all ; such as calling 
the sun " the goldsmith of the stars," " the enameller of the 
moon," and " the Apelles of the flowers." This is as bad as 

* His mistress. 



THE AGE OF ELIZABET 



Cowley or Sir Philip Sidney. Here is one that is worth a million 
of such quaint devices : 

*' To the Nightingale. 

Dear chorister, who from these shadows sends*, 

Ere that the blushing morn dare show her light, 

Such sad lamenting strains, that night attends 

(Become all eart) stars stay to hear thy plight. 

If one whose grief even reach of thought transcends. 

Who ne'er (not in a dream) did taste delight, 

May thee importune who like case pretends, 

And seem'st to joy in woe, in woe's despite: 

Tell me (so may thou milder fortune try, 

And long, long sing !) for what thou thus complains,- 

Since winter's gone, and sun in dappled sky 

Enamour'd smiles on woods and flow'ry plains 1 

The bird, as if my questions did her move, 

With trembling wings sigh'd forth, ' I love, I love,' " 

Or if a mixture of the Delia Cruscan style be allowed to en- 
shrine the true spirit of love and poetry, we have it in the fol- 
lowing address to the river Forth, on which his mistress had em- 
barked : 

" Slide soft, fair Forth, and make a crystal plain, 

Cut your white locks, and on your foamy face 

Let not a wrinkle be, when you embrace 

The boat that earth's perfection doth contain. 

Winds wonder, and through wondering hold your peace, 

Or if that you your hearts cannot restrain 

From sending sighs, feeling a lover's case. 

Sigh, and in her fair hair yourselves enchain. 

Or take these sighs, which absence makes arise 

From my oppressed breast, and fill the sails. 

Or some sweet breath new brought from Paradise. 

The floods do smile, love o'er the winds prevails, 

And yet huge waves arise ; the cause is this. 

The ocean strives with Forth the boat to kiss." 

This to the English reader will express the very soul of Pe- 
trarch, the molten breath of sentiment converted into the glassy 
essence of a set of glittering but still graceful conceits. 

" The fly that sips treacle is lost in the sweets," and the critic 

* Scotch for send'st ; for complain'st, &c. 
t " I was all ear ;" see Milton's ' Comus.' 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 145 

that tastes poetry " ruin meets." His feet are clogged with its 
honey, and his eyes blinded with its beauties ; and he forgets his 
proper vocation, which is to buzz and sting. I am afraid of 
losing my way in Drummond's "sugar'd sonnetting :" and have 
determined more than once to break off abruptly ; but another 
and another tempts the rash hand and curious eye, which I 
am loth not to give, and I give it accordingly : for if I did not 
write these Lectures to please myself, I am at least sure I should 
please nobody else. In fact, I conceive that what I have under- 
taken to do in this and former cases, is merely to read over a set 
of authors with the audience, as I would do with a friend, to 
point out a favourite passage, to explain an objection ; or if a re- 
mark or a theory occuj-s, to state it in illustration of the subject, 
but neither to tire him nor puzzle myself with pedantic rules and 
pragmatical formulas of criticism that can do no good to any- 
body. I do not come to the task with a pair of compasses or a 
ruler in my pocket, to see whether a poem is round or square, or 
to measure its mechanical dimensions, like a metre and alnager 
of poetry : it is not in my bond to look after exciseable articles or 
contraband wares, or to exact severe penalties and forfeitures for 
trifling oversights, or to give formal notice of violent breaches of 
the three unities, of geography and chronology ; or to distribute 
printed stamps and poetical licences (with blanks to be filled up) 
on Mount Parnassus. I do not come armed from top to toe with 
colons and semi-colons, with glossaries and indexes, to adjust the 
spelling or reform the metre, or to prove by everlasting contra- 
diction and querulous impatience, that former commentators did 
not know the meaning of their author, any more than I do, who 
am angry at them, only because I am out of humour with myself 
— as if the genius of poetry lay buried under the rubbish of the 
press ; and the critic was the dwarf-enchanter who was to re- 
lease its airy form from being stuck through with blundering 
points and misplaced commas ; or to prevent its vital powers 
from being worm-eaten and consumed, letter by letter, in musty 
manuscripts and black-letter print. I do not think that is the 
way to learn "the gentle craft" of poesy, or to teach it to 
others : — to imbibe or to communicate its spirit ; which, if it does 
not disentangle itself and soar above the obscure and trivial re- 



146 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

searches of antiquarianism, is no longer itself, " a phcenix gazed 
by all." At least, so it appeared to me ; it is for others to judge 
whether I was right or wrong. In a word, I have endeavoured 
to feel what was good, and to " give a reason for the faith that 
was in me," when necessary, and when in my power. This is 
what I have done, and what I must continue to do. 

To return to Drummond. — I cannot but think that his sonnets 
come as near as almost any others to the perfection of this kind 
of writing, which should embody a sentiment, and every shade of 
a sentiment, as it varies with time and place and humour, with the 
extravagance or lightness of a momentary impression, and should, 
when lengthened out into a series, form a history of the wayward 
moods of the poet's mind, the turns of his fate; and imprint the 
smile or frown of his mistress in indelible characters on the scat- 
tered leaves. I will give the two following, and have done with 
this author : 

" In vain I haunt the cold and silver springs, 

To quench the fever burning in my veins : 

In vain (love's pilgrim) mountains, dales, and plains 

1 over-run ; vain help long absence brings. 

In vain, my friends, your counsel me constrains 

To fly, and place my thoughts on other things. 

Ah, like the bird that fired hath her wings, 

The more I move the greater are my pains. 

Desire, alas ! desire a Zeuxis new. 

From th' orient borrowing gold, from western skies 

Heavenly cinnabar, sets before my eyes 

In every place her hair, sweet look and hue ; 

That fly, run, rest I, all doth prove but vain ; 

My life lies in those eyes which have me slain." 

The other is a direct imitation of Petrarch's description of the 
bower where he first saw Laura : 

" Alexis, here she stay'd among these pines, 

Sweet hermitress. she did alone repair : 

Here did she spread the treasure of her hair, 

More rich than that brought from the Colchian mines; 

Here sat she by these musked eglantines ; 

The happy flowers seem yet the print to bear: 

Her voice did sweeten here thy su^ar'd lines. 

To which winds, trees, beasts, birds, did lend an ear. 

She here me first perceiv'd, and here a morn 

Of bright carnations did o'erspread her face ; 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 147 

Here did she sigh, here first my hopes were born, 
Here first I got a pledge of promised grace ; 
But ah ! what serves to have been made happy so, 
Sith past pleasures double but new woe !" 

I should, on the whole, prefer Drummond's sonnets to Spen- 
ser's ; and they leave Sydney's, picking their way through ver- 
bal intricacies and " thorny queaches,"* at an immeasurable dis- 
tance behind. Drummond's other poems have great though not 
equal merit ; and he may be fairly set down as one of our old 
English classics. 

Ben Jonson's detached poetry I like much, as indeed I do all 
about him, except when he degraded himself by " the laborious 
foolery" of some of his farcical characters, which he could not 
deal with sportively, and only made stupid and pedantic. I have 
been blamed for what I have said, more than once, in disparage- 
ment of Ben Jonson's comic humour ; but I think he was himself 
aware of his infirmity, and has (not improbably) alluded to it in 
the following speech of Crites in ' Cynthia's Revels :' 

" Oh, how despised and base a thing is man, 

If he not strive to erect his groveling thoughts 

Above the strain of flesh ! But how more cheap, 

When even his best and understanding part 

(The crown and strength of all his faculties) 

Floats like a dead-drown'd body, on the stream 

Of vulgar humour, mixd with common'st dregs: 

I suffer for their guilt now ; and my soul 

(Like one that looks on ill-affected eyes) 

Is hurt with mere intention on their follies. 

Why will I view them then '? my sense might ask me : 

Or is't a rarity or some new object 

That strains my strict observance to this point: 

But such is the perverseness of our nature, 

That if we once but fancy levity, 

(How antic and ridiculous soever 

It suit with us) yet will our muffled thought 

Chuse rather not to see it than avoid it," &c. 

Ben Jonson had self-knowledge and self- reflection enough to 
apply this to himself. His tenaciousness on the score of critical 

* Chapman's Hymn to Pan. 



148 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

objections does not prove that he was not conscious of them him- 
self, but the contrary. The greatest egotists are those whom it 
is impossible to offend, because they are wholly and incurably 
blind to their own defects ; or if they could be made to see them, 
would instantly convert them into so many beauty-spots and or- 
namental graces. Ben Jonson's fugitive and lighter pieces are 
not devoid of the characteristic merits of that class of composi- 
tion ; but still often in the happiest of them, there is a specific 
gravity in the author's pen, that sinks him to the bottom of his 
subject, though buoyed up for a time with art and painted plumes, 
and produces a strange mixture of the mechanical and fanciful, 
of poetry and prose, in his songs and odes. For instance, one 
of his most airy effusions is the ' Triumph of his Mistress :' yet 
there are some lines in it that seem inserted almost by way of 
burlesque. It is, however, well worth repeating. 

" See the chariot at hand here of love 

Wherin my lady rideth ! 

Each that draws it is a swan or a dove ; 

And well the car love guideth ! 

As she goes all hearts do duty 

Unto her beauty: 
And enamour'd, do wish so they might 

But enjoy such a sight, 
That they still were to run by her side, 
Through swords, through seas, whither she would ride. 
Do but look on her eyes, they do light 

All that love's world compriseth ! 
Do but look on her hair, it is bright 

As love's star when it riseth ! 
Do but mark, her forehead's smoother 

Than words that soothe her: 
And from her arch'd brows, such a grace 

Sheds itself through the face, 
As alone their triumphs to the life 
All the gain, all the good of the elements' strife. 

Have you seen but a bright lily glow, 
Before rude hands have touch 'd itl 
Ha' you mark'd but the fall of the snow 
Before the soil hath smutch'd it 1 
Ha' you felt the icool of beaver? 
Or swan's down ever % 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 149 

Or have smelt o' the bud o' the briar 1 

Or the nard in the fire? 

Or have tasted the bag of the bee % 

Oh, so white ! Oh, so soft ! Oh, so sweet is she!" 

His 'Discourse with Cupid,' which follows, is infinitely deli- 
cate and piquant, and without one single blemish. It is a perfect 
" nest of spicery." 

" Noblest Charis, you that are 
Both my fortune and my star ! 
And do govern more my blood, 
Thau the various moon the flood! 
Hear, what late discourse of you, 
' Love and I have had ; and true. 
'Mongst my Muses finding me, 
Where he chanc'd your name to see 
Set, and to this softer strain ; 
' Sure,' said he, ' If I have brain, 
This here sung can be no other, 
By description, but my mother ! 
So hath Homer prais'd her hair ; 
So Anacreon drawn the air 
Of her face, and made to rise. 
Just about lier sparkling eyes, 
Both her brows bent like my bow. 
By her looks I do her know. 
Which you call my shafts. And see ! 
Such my mother's blushes be. 
As the bath your verse discloses 
In her cheeks, of milk and roses ; 
Such as oft I wanton in. 
And, above her even chin. 
Have you plac'd the bank of kisses, 
Where you say, men gather blisses, 
Ripen'd with a breath more sweet. 
Than when flowers and west-winds meet, 
Nay, her white and polish'd neck, 
With the lace that doth it deck, 
Is my mother's ! hearts of slain 
Lovers, made into a chain ! 
And between each rising breast 
Lies the valley, call'd my nest, 
Where I sit and proyne my wings 
After flight; and put new slings 
To my shafts ! Her very name 



150 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

With my mother's is the same.' — 
' I confess all,' I replied, 
' And the glass hangs by her side, 
And the girdle 'bout her waist, 
All is Venus: save unchaste. 
But, alas! thou seest the least 
Of her good, who is the best 
Of her sex; but could'st thou. Love, 
Call to mind the forms that strove 
For the apple, and those three 
Make in one, the same were she. 
For this beauty yet doth hide 
Something more than tliou hast spied. 
Outward grace weak love beguiles : 
She is Venas when she smiles, 
But she's Juno when she walks, 
And Minerva when she talks.' " 

In one of the songs in ' Cynthia's Revels,' we find, amidst 
some very pleasing imagery, the origin of a celebrated line in 
modern poetry — 

" Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip," &c. 

This has not even the merit of originality, which is hard upon it. 
Ben Jonson had said two hundred years before, 

" Oh, I could still 
(Like melting snow upon some craggy hill) 

Drop, drop, drop, drop. 
Since nature's pride is now a wither'd daflfodil." 

His ' Ode to the Memory of Sir Lucius Gary and Sir H. Mor- 
rison' has been much admired, but I cannot but think it one of 
his most fantastical and perverse performances. 

I cannot, for instance, reconcile myself to such stanzas as 
these : 

" Of which we priests and poets say 
Such truths as we expect for happy men^ 
And there he lives with memory; and Ben 

The Sicmd. 

Jonson, who sung this of him, ere he went 
Himself to rest, 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 151 

Or taste a part of that full joy he meant 

To have exprest, 

In this bright asterism ; 

"Where it were friendship's schism 

(Were not his Lucius long with us to tarry) 

To separate these twi- 

Lights, the Dioscori ; 

And keep the one half from his Harry. 

But fate doth so alternate the design, 

While that in Heaven, this light on earth doth shine." 

This seems as if because he cannot without difficulty write 
smoothly, he becomes rough and crabbed in a spirit of defiance, 
like those persons who cannot behave well in company, and affect 
rudeness to show their contempt for the opinions of others. 

His ' Epistles' are particularly good, equally full of strong 
sense and sound feeling. They show that he was not without 
friends, whom he esteemed, and by whom he was deservedly es- 
teemed in return. The controversy started about his character 
is an idle one, carried on in the mere spirit of contradiction, as 
if he were either made up - entirely of gall, or dipped in " the 
milk of human kindness." There is no necessity or ground to 
suppose either. He was no doubt a sturdy, plain-spoken, honest, 
well-disposed man, inclining more to the severe than the amiable 
side of things ; but his good qualities, learning, talents, and con- 
vivial habits preponderated over his defects of temper or man- 
ners ; and in a course of friendship some difference of character, 
even a little roughness or acidity, may relish to the palate ; and 
olives may be served up with efiect as well as sweetmeats. Ben 
Jonson, even by his quarrels and jealousies, does not seem to 
have been curst with the last and damning disqualification for 
friendship, — heartless indifTerence. He was also what is under- 
stood by a good fellow, fond of good cheer and good company : 
and the first step for others to enjoy your society, is for you to 
enjoy theirs. If any one can do without the world, it is certain 
that the world can do quite as well without him. His ' Verses 
Inviting a Friend to Supper' give us as familiar an idea of his 
private habits and character, as his ' Epistle to Michael Drayton,' 
that to Selden, &c. ; his ' Lines to the Memory of Shakspeare,' 



152 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



and his noble prose ' Eulogy on Lord Bacon,' in his disgrace, do 
a favourable one. 

Among the best of these (perhaps the very best) is the ' Ad- 
dress to Sir Robert Wroth,' which, besides its manly moral senti- 
ments, conveys a strikingly picturesque description of rural 
sports and manners at this interesting period : 

" How blest art thou, canst love the country, Wroth, 

Whether by choice, or fate, or both! 

And though so near the city and the court, 

Art ta'en with neither's vice nor sport: 

That at great times, art no ambitious guest 

Of sheriff's dinner, or of mayor's feast; 

Nor com'st to view the better cloth of state, 

The richer hangings, or the crown-plate ; 

Nor throng'st (when masquing is) to have a sight 

Of the short bravery of the night ; 

To view the jewels, stuffs, the pains, the wit 

There wasted, some not paid for yet ! 

But canst at home, in thy securer rest, 

Live with unbought provision blest; 

Free from proud porches or their gilded roofs, 

•'Mongst lowing heards and solid hoofs : 

Along the curled woods and painted meads, 

Through which a serpent river leads 

To some cool courteous shade, which he calls his, 

And makes sleep softer than it is ! 

Or if thou list the night in watch to break, 

A-bed canst hear the loud stag speak, 

In spring oft roused for their master's sport, 

Who for it makes thy house his court; 

Or with thy friends, the heart of all the year, 

Divid'st upon the lesser deer ; 

In autumn, at the partrich mak'st a flight. 

And giv'st thy gladder guests the sight ; 

And in ihe winter hunt'st the flying hare. 

More for thy exercise than fare ; 

While all that follows, their glad ears apply 

To the full greatness of the cry: 

Or hawking at the river or the bush, 

Or shooiing at the greedy thrush. 

Thou dosL with some delight the day out- wear. 

Although the coldest of the year! 

The wiiilst the several seasons thou hast seen 

Of flow'ry fields, of copses green. 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 153 

The mowed meadows, with the fleeced sheep, 

And feasts that either shearers keep ; 

The ripened ears yet humble in their height, 

And furrows laden with their weight ; 

The apple-harvest that doth longer last ; 

The hogs return'd home fat from mast ; 

The trees cut out in log; and those boughs made 

A fire now, that lent a shade ! 

Thus Pan and Sylvan having had their rites, 

Comus puts in for new delights ; 

And fills thy open hall with mirth and cheer, 

As if in Saturn's reign it were ; 

Apollo's harp and Hermes' lyre resound. 

Nor are the Muses strangers found: 

The rout of rural folk come thronging in 

(Their rudeness then is thought no sin). 

Thy noblest spouse aflfords them welcome grace : 

And the great heroes of her race 

Sit mixt with loss of state or reverence. 

Freedom doth with degree dispense. 

The jolly wassail walks the often round, 

And in their cups their cares are drown'd . 

They think not then which side the cause shall leese, 

Nor how to get the lawyer fees. 

Such, and no other, was that age of old, 

Which boasts t' have had the head of gold. 

And such since thou canst make thine own content, 

Strive, Wroth, to live long innocent. 

Let others watch in guilty arms, and stand 

The fury of a rash command, 

Go enter breaches, meet the cannon's rage. 

That they may sleep wiih scars in age. 

And show their feathers shot and colours torn, 

And brag that the}- were therefore born. 

Let this man sweat, and wrangle at the bar 

For every price in every jar. 

And change possessions oftener with his breath. 

Than either money, war, or death : 

Let him, than hardest sires, more disinherit, 

And eachwhere boast it as his merit, 

To blow up orphans, widows, and their states ; 

And think his power doth equal Fate's. 

Let that go heap a mass of wretched wealth, 

Purchas'd by rapine, worse than stealth ; 

And brooding o'er it sit, with broadest eyes, 

Not doing good, scarce when he dies. 

11 



154 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

Let thousands more go flatter vice, and win, 

By being organs to great sin ; 

Get place and honour, and be glad to keep 

The secrets that shall break their sleep : 

And, so they ride in purple, eat in plate, 

Though poison, think it a great fate. 

But thou, my Wroth, if I can truth apply, 

Shalt neither that nor this envy : 

Thy peace is made ; and, when man's state is well, 

'Tis better, if he there can dwell. 

God wisheih none should wrack on a strange shelf; 

To him man's dearer than t' himself. 

And howsoever, we may think things sweet, 

He always gives what he knows meet ; 

Which who can use is happy : such be thou. 

Thy morning's and thy evening's vow 

Be thanks to him, and earnest prayer, to find 

A body sound, with sounder mind ; 

To do thy country service, thyself right ; 

That neither want do thee affright. 

Nor death ; but when thy latest sand is spent, 

Thou mayst think life a thing but lent."' 

Of all the poetical Epistles of this period, however, that of 
Daniel to the Countess of Cumberland, for weight of thought and 
depth of feeling, bears the palm. The reader will not peruse 
this effusion with less interest or pleasure, from knowing that it 
is a favourite with Mr. Wordsworth : 

" He that of such a height hath bailt his mind. 
And rear'd the dwelling of his thoughts so strong, 
As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame 
Of his resolved powers ; nor all the wind 
Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong 
His settled peace, or to disturb the same: " 
What a fair seat hath he, from whence he may 
The boundless wastes and wilds of man survey ! 
And with how free an eye doth he look down 
Upon these lower regions of turmoil. 
Where all the storms of passions mainly beat 
On flesh and blood : where honour, pow'r, renown, 
Are only gay afflictions, golden toil ; 
Where greatness stands upon as feeble feet 
As frailty doth ; and only great doth seem 
To little minds, who do it so esteem. 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 155 



He looks upon the mightiest monarch's wars 

But only as on stately robberies ; 

Where evermore the fortune that prevails 

Must be the right : the ill-succeeding mars 

The fairest and the best fac'd enterprize. 

Great pirate Pompey lesser pirates quails : 

Justice, he sees (as if seduced) still 

Conspires with pow'r, whose cause must not be ill. 
He sees the face of right t' appear as manifold 

As are the passions of uncertain man; 

Who puts it in all colours, all attires, 

To serve his ends, and make his courses hold. 

He sees, that let deceit work what it can, 

Plot and contrive base ways to high desires j 

That the all-guiding Providence doth yet 
All disappoint, and mocks this smoke of wit. 
Nor is he mov'd with all the thunder-cracks 
Of tyrants' threats, or with the surly brow 
Of pow'r, that proudly sits on others' crimes, 
Charg'd with more crying sins than those he checks. 
The storms of sad confusion, that may grow 
Up in the priesent for the coming times. 
Appal not him ; that hath no side at all, 
But of himself, and knows the worst can fall. 
Although his heart (so near alhed to earth) 
Cannot but pity the perplexed state 
Of troublous and distress'd mortality. 
That thus make way unto the ugly hirth 
Of their own sorrows, and do still beget 
Affliction upon imbecility : 
Yet seeing thus the course of things must run, 
He looks thereon not strange, but as fore-done. 

And whilst distraught ambition compasses, 
And is encompass'd ; whilst as craft deceives, 
And is deceiv'd ; whilst man doth ransack man, 
And builds on blood, and rises by distress ; 
And th' inheritance of desolation leaves 
To great expecting hopes ; he looks thereon, 
As from the shore of peace, with unwet eye. 
And bears no venture in impiety." 

Michael Drayton's ' Poly-Olbion' is a work of great length 
and of unabated freshness and vigour in itself, though the mono- 
tony of the subject tires the reader. He describes each place 
with the accuracy of a topographer, and the enthusiasm of a 



156 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



poet, as if his muse were the very genius loci. His ' Heroical 
Epistles' are also excellent. He has a few lighter pieces, but 
none of exquisite beauty or grace. His mind is a rich marly 
soil that produces an abundant harvest, and repays the husband- 
man's toil ; but few flaunting flowers, the garden's pride, grow 
in it, nor any poisonous weeds. 

P. Fletcher's ' Purple Island ' is nothing but a long enigma, 
describing the body of a man, with the heart and veins, and the 
blood circulating in them, under the fantastic designation of ' The 
Purple Island.' 

The other poets whom I shall mention, and who properly be- 
long to the age immediately following, were William Browne, 
Carew, Crashaw, Herrick, and Marvell. Browne was a pasto- 
ral poet, with much natural tenderness and sweetness, and a 
good deal of allegorical quaintness and prolixity. Carew was an 
elegant court-trifler. Herrick was an amorist, with perhaps 
more fancy than feeling, though he has been called by some the 
English Anacreon. Crashaw was a hectic enthusiast in religion 
and in poetry, and erroneous in both. Marvell deserves to be re- 
membered as a true poet as well as patriot, not in the best of 
times. I will, however, give short specimens from each of these 
writers, that the reader may judge for himself, and be led by his 
own curiosity, rather than my recommendation, to consult the 
originals. Here is one by T. Carew : 

" Ask me no more where Jove bestows, 
When June is past, the fading rose : 
For in your beauties, orient deep 
These flow'rs, as in their causes, sleep. 

Ask me no more, whither do stray 
The golden atoms of the day ; 
For in pure love, Heaven did prepare 
Those powders to enrich your hair. 

Ask me no more, whither doth haste 
The nightingale, when May is past ; 
For in your sweet dividing throat 
She winters, and keeps warm her note. 

Ask me no more, where those stars light, 
That downwards fall in dead of night ; 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 157 



For in your eyes they sit, and there 
Fixed become, as in their sphere. 

Ask me no more, if east or west 
The phoenix builds her spicy nest ; 
For unto you at last she flies, 
And in your fragrant bosom dies." 

* The Hue and Cry of Love,' ' The Epitaphs on Lady Mary 
Villiers,' and ' The Friendly Reproof to Ben Jonson for his Angry 
Farewell to the Stage,' are in the author's best manner. We 
may perceive, however, a frequent mixture of the superficial and 
common-place, with far-fetched and improbable conceits. 

Herrick is a writer who does not answer the expectations I 
had formed of him. He is in a manner a modern discovery, and 
so far has the freshness of antiquity about him. He is not trite 
and thread-bare. But neither is he likely to become so. He is 
a writer of epigrams, not of lyrics. He has point and ingenuity, 
but I think little of the spirit of love or wine. From his frequent 
allusion to pearls and rubies, one might take him for a lapidary 
instead of a poet. One of his pieces is entitled 

" The Rock of Rubies and the Quarry of Pearls. 

Some ask'd me where the rubies grew ; 

And nothing I did say ; 
But with my finger pointed to 

The lips of Julia. 

Some ask'd how pearls did grow, and where ; 

Then spoke I to my girl 
To part her lips, and show them there 

The quarrelets of pearl." 

Now this is making a petrifaction both of love and poetry. 

His poems, from their number and size, are " like the moats 
that play in the sun's beams;" that glitter to the eye of fancy, 
but leave no distinct impression on the memory. The two best 
are a translation of Anacreon, and a successful and spirited imi- 
tation of him. 



158 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



" The Wounded Cupid. 

Cupid, as he lay among 

Roses, by a bee was stung. 

Whereupon, in anger flying 

To his mother, said thus, crying, 

Help, oh help, your boy's a-dying ! 

And why, my pretty lad 1 said she. 

Then, blubbering, replied he, 

A winged snake has bitten me, 

Which country-people call a bee. 

At which she smiled ; then with her hairs 

And kisses drying up his tears, 

Alas, said she, my wag ! if this 

Such a pernicious torment is ; 

Come, tell me then, how great 's the smart 

Of those thou woundest with thy dart 1" 

The Captive Bee, or the Little Fileher,' is his own 

" As Julia once a slumbering lay, 

It chanced a bee did fly that way, 

After a dew, or dew-like show'r, 

To tipple freely in a flow'r. 

For some rich flow'r he took the lip 

Of Julia, and began to sip : 

But when he felt he suck'd from thence 

Honey, and in the quintessence. 

He drank so much he scarce could stir ; 

So Julia took the pilferer. 

And thus surpris'd, as filchers use, 

He thus began himself to excuse : 

Sweet lady-flow'r ! I never brought 

Hither the least one thieving thought ; 

But taking those rare lips of your's 

For some fresh, fragrant, luscious flow'rs, 

I thought I might there take a taste. 

Where so much syrup run at waste ; 

Besides, know this, I never sting 

The flow'r that gives me nourishing ; 

But with a kiss of thanks do pay 

For honey that I bear away. 

This said, he laid his little scrip 

Of honey 'fore her ladyship; 

And told her, as some tears did fall. 

That that he took, and that was all. 

At which she smil'd, and bid him go, 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 1&9 

And take his bag, but thus much know, 
When next he came a pilfering so, 
He should from her full lips derive 
Honey enough to fill his hive." 

Of Marvell I have spoken with such praise as appears to me 
his due, on another occasion ; but the public are deaf, except to 
proof or to their own prejudices, and I will therefore give an ex- 
ample of the sweetness and power of his verse. 

" To his Coy Mistress. 

Had we but world enough, and time, 

This coyness, lady, were no crime. 

We would sit down and think which way 

To walk, and pass our long love's day. 

Thou by the Indian Ganges' side 

Should'st rubies find : I by the tide 

Of Humber wovild complain. I would 

Love you ten years before the flood ; 

And you should, if you please, refuse 

Till the conversion of the Jews. 

My vegetable love should grow 

Vaster than empires, and more slow. 

An hundred years should go to praise 

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze ; 

Two hundred to adore each breast ; 

But thirty thousand to the rest. 

An age at least to every part, 

And the last age should show your heart. 

For, lady, you deserve this state ; 

Nor would I love at lower rate. • * 

But at my back I always hear 
Time's winged chariot hurrying near: 
And yonder all before us lie 
Deserts of vast eternity. 
Thy beauty shall no more be found; 
Nor in thy marble vault shall sound 
My echoing song ; then worms shall try 
That long preserved virginity ; 
And your quaint honour turn to dust ; 
And into ashes all my lust. 
The grave's a fine and private place, 
But none, I think, do there embrace. 

Now, therefore, while the youthful hue 
Sits on thy skin, like morning dew, 



160 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

And while thy willing soul transpires 

At every pore with instant fires, ^ 

Now let us sport us while we may ; 

And now, like amorous birds of prey, 

Rather at once our time devour. 

Than languish in his slow-chapp'd pow'r. 

Let us roll all our strength, and all 

Our sweetness up into one ball ; 

And tear our pleasures with rough strife, 

Through the iron gates of life. 

Thus, though we cannot make our sun 

Stand still, yet we will make him run." 

In Browne's 'Pastorals,' notwithstanding the weakness and 
prolixity of his general plan, there are repeated examples of 
single lines and passages of extreme beauty and delicacy, both 
of sentiment and description, such as the following Picture of 
Night : 

" Clamour grew dumb, unheard was shepherd's song. 
And silence girt the woods : no warbling tongue 
Talk'd to the echo ; satyrs broke their dance, 
And all the upper world lay in a trance, 
Only the curled streams soft chidings kept ; 
And little gales that from the green leaf swept 
Dry summer's dust, in fearful whisperings stirr'd, 
As loth to waken any singing bird." 

Poetical beauties of this sort are scattered, not sparingly, over 
tne green lap of nature through almost every page of our author's 
writings. His description of the squirrel hunted by mischievous 
boys, of the flowers stuck in the windows like the hues of the 
rainbow, and innumerable others, might be quoted. 

His ' Philarete' (the fourth song of the ' Shepherd's Pipe') has 
been said to be the origin of' Lycidas;' but there is no resem- 
blance, except that both are pastoral elegies for the loss of a 
friend. ' The Inner Temple Mask' has also been made the foun- 
dation of ' Comus,' with as little reason. But so it is : if an au- 
thor is once detected in borrowing, he will be suspected of pla- 
giarism ever after ; and every writer that finds an ingenious or 
partial editor, will be made to set up his claim to originality 
against him. A more serious charge of this kind has been urged 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 161 

against the principal character in ' Paradise Lost' (that of Satan), 
which is said to have been taken from Marino, an Italian poet. 
Of this we may be able to form some judgment, by a comparison 
with Crashaw's translation of Marino's ' Sospetto d'Herode.' 
The description of Satan alluded to is given in the following 
stanzas : — 

" Below the bottom of the great abyss, 
There where one centre reconciles all things, 
The world's profound heart pants; there placed is 
Mischiefs old master ; close about him clings 
A curl'd knot of embracing snakes, that kiss 
His correspondent cheeks; these loathsome strings 
Hold the perverse prince in eternal ties 
Fast bound, since first he forfeited the skies. 

The judge of torments, and the king of tears, 
He fills a burnish'd throne of quenchless fire; 
And for his own fair robes of light, he wears 
A gloomy mantle of dai'k flames ; the tire 
That crowns his hated head, on high appears ; 
Where seven tall horns (his empire's pride) aspire ; 
And, to make up hell's majesty, each horn 
Seven crested hydras horribly adorn. 

His eyes, the sullen dens of death and night, 
Startle the dull air with a dismal red ; 
Such his fell glances as the fatal light 
Of staring comets, that look kingdoms dead. 
From his black nostrils and blue lips, in spite 
Of hell's own stink, a worser stench is spread. 
His breath hell's lightning is ; and each deep groan 
Disdains to think that heaven thunders alone. 

His flaming eyes' dire exhalation 

Unto a dreadful pile gives fiery breath ; 

Whose unconsum'd consumption preys upon 

The never-dying life of a long death. 

In this sad house of slow destruction 

(His shop of flames) he fries himself beneath 

A mass of woes; his teeth for torment gnash. 

While his steel sides sound with his tail's strong lash." 

This portrait of monkish superstition does not equal the gran- 
deur of Milton's description : 



162 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

" His form had not yet lost 

All her original brightness, nor appear'd 
Less than archangel ruin'd and the excess 
Of glory obscured." 

Milton has got rid of the horns and tail, the vulgar and physi- 
cal insignia of the devil, and clothed him with other greater and 
intellectual terrors, reconciling beauty and sublimity, and con- 
verting the grotesque and deformed into the ideal and classical. 
Certainty, Milton's mind rose superior to all others in this res- 
pect, on the outstretched wings of philosophic contemplation, in 
not confounding the depravity of the will with physical distortion, 
or supposing that the distinctions of good and evil were only to 
be subjected to the gross ordeal of the senses. In the subsequent 
stanzas, we however find the traces of some of Milton's boldest 
imagery, though its effect be injured by the incongruous mixture 
above stated. 

" Struck with these great concurrences of things,* 
Symptoms so deadly unto death and him ; 
Fain would he have forgot what fatal strings 
Eternally bind each rebellious limb, 
He shook himself, and spread his spacious wings, 
Which like two bosom'd sailst embrace the dim 
Air, with a dismal shade, but all in VEiin : 
Of sturdy adamant is his strong chain. 

While thus heav'n's counsels, by the low 
Footsteps of their effects, he traced too well, 
He tost his troubled eyes, embers that glow 
Now with new rage, and wax too hot for hell. 
With his foul claws he fenced his furrow'd brow, 
And gave a ghastly shriek, whose horrid yell 
Ran trembling through the hollow vaults of night." 

The poet adds — 

" The while his twisted tail he gnaw'd for spite." 

There is no keeping in this. This action of meanness and 
mere vulgar spite, common to the most contemptible creatures, 

* Alluding to the fulfilment of the prophecies and the birth of the Messiah, 
t " He spreads his sail-broad vans." — ' Par. Lost,' b. ii., 1. 927. 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 163 

takes away from the terror and power just ascribed to the prince 
of Hell, and implied in the nature of the consequences attributed 
to his every movement of mind or body. Satan's soliloquy to 
himself is more beautiful and more in character at the same 
time: 

" Art thou not Lucifer 1 he to whom the droves 

Of stars that gild the morn in charge were given 1 

The nimblest of the lightning-winged loves 1 

The fairest and the first-born smile of heav'n 1 

Look in what pomp the mistress planet moves, 

Reverently circled by the lesser seven : 

Such and so rich the flames that from thine eyes 

Opprest the common people of the skies 1 

Ah ! wretch ! what boots it to cast back thine eyes 

Where dawning hope no beam of comfort shows V &c. 

This is true beauty and true sublimity : it is also true pathos 
and morality : for it interests the mind, and affects it powerfully 
with the idea of glory tarnished, and happiness forfeited with the 
loss of virtue ; but from the horns and tail of the brute-demon, 
imagination cannot re-ascend to the Son of the morning, nor be 
dejected by the transition from weal to woe, which it cannot 
without a violent effort picture to itself. 

In our author's account of Cruelty, the chief minister of Satan, 
there is also a considerable approach to Milton's description of 
Death and Sin, the portress of hell-gates : 

" Thrice howl'd the caves of night, and thrice the sound, 
Thundering upon the banks of those black lakes, 
Rung through the hollow vaults of hell profound : 
At last her listening ears the noise o'ertakes. 
She lifts her sooty lamps and looking round, 
A general hiss,* from the whole tire of snakes 
Rebounding through hell's inmost caverns came. 
In answer to her formidable name. 

'Mongst all the palaces in hell's command, 
No one so merciless as this of hers, 
The adamantine doors for ever stand 
Impenetrable, both to prayers and tears. 

* See Satan's reception on his return to Pandemonium, in bookx. of 'Para- 
dise Lost.' 



164 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

The walls' inexorable steel, no hand 
Of time, or teeth of hungry ruin fears." 

On the whole, this poem, though Milton has undoubtedly- 
availed himself of many ideas and passages in it, raises instead 
of lowering our conception of him, by showing how much more 
he added to it than he has taken from it. 

Crashaw's translation of Strada's description of the contention 
between a nightingale and a musician, is elaborate and spirited, 
but not equal to Ford's version of the same story in his ' Lover's 
Melancholy.' One line may serve as a specimen of delicate 
quaintness, and of Crashaw's style in general : 

" And with a quavering coyness tastes the strings." 

Sir Philip Sidney is a writer for whom I cannot acquire a 
taste. As Mr. Burke said, " he could not love the French Re- 
public" — so I may say, that I cannot love ' The Countess of 
Pembroke's Arcadia,' with all my good-will to it. It will not do 
for me, however, to imitate the summary petulance of the epi- 
grammatist : 

" The reason why I cannot tell, 
But I don't like thee, Dr. Fell." 

I must give my reasons, " on compulsion," for not speaking 
well of a person like Sir Philip Sidney — 

" The soldier's, scholar's, courtier's €ye, tongue, sword, 
The glass of fashion, and the mould of form ;" 

the splendour of whose personal accomplishments, and of whose 
wide-spread fame, was, in his life-time, 

" Like a gate of steel, 



Fronting the sun, that renders back 
His figure and his heat" — 

a writer, too, who was universally read and enthusiastically ad- 
mired for a century after his death, and who has been admired 
with scarce less enthusiastic, but with a more distant homage, 
for another century, after ceasing to be read. 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 165 

We have lost the art of reading, or the privilege of writing/ 
voluminously, since the days of Addison. Learning no longer 
weaves the interminable page with patient drudgery, nor igno- 
rance pores over it with implicit faith. As authors multiply in 
number, books diminish in size; we- cannot now, as formerly, 
swallow libraries whole in a single folio : solid quarto has given 
place to slender duodecimo, and the dingy letter-press contracts 
its dimensions, and retreats before the white, unsullied, faultless 
margin. Modern authorship is become a species of stenography : 
we contrive even to read by proxy. We skim the cream of prose 
without any trouble ; we get at the quintessence of poetry with- 
out loss of time. The staple commodity, the coarse, heavy, dirty, 
unwieldy bullion of books, is driven out of the market of learning, 
and the intercourse of the literary world is carried on, and the 
credit of the great capitalists sustained by the flimsy circulating 
medium of magazines and reviews. Those who are chiefly con- 
cerned in catering for the taste of others, and serving up critical 
opinions in a compendious, elegant, and portable form, are not 
forgetful of themselves : they are not scrupulously solicitous, 
idly inquisitive, about the real merits, the hona fide contents of 
the works they are deputed to appraise and value, any more than 
the reading public who employ them. They look no farther for 
the contents of the work than the title-page, and pronounce a 
peremptory decision on its merits or defects by a glance at the 
name and party of the writer. This state of polite letters seems 
to admit of improvement in only one respect, which is to go a 
step farther, and write for the amusement and edification of the 
world, accounts of works that were never either written or read 
at all, and to cry up or abuse the authors by name, though they 
have no existence but in the critic's invention. This would save 
a great deal of labour in vain ; anonymous critics might pounce 
upon the defenceless heads of fictitious candidates for fame and 
bread ; reviews, from being novels founded upon facts, would 
aspire to be pure romances ; and we should arrive at the heau 
ideal of a commonwealth of letters, at the euthanasia of thought, 
and millennium of criticism ! 

At the time that Sir Philip Sidney's ' Arcadia' was written, 
those middle-men, the critics, were not known. The author an(J 



166 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

reader came into immediate contact, and seemed never tired of 
each other's company. We are more fastidious and dissipated : 
the effeminacy of modern taste would, I am afraid, shrink back 
affrighted at the formidable sight of this once popular work, 
which is about as long (horresco referens /) as all Walter Scott's 
novels put together ; but besides its size and appearance, it has, 
I think, other defects of a more intrinsic and insuperable nature. 
It is to me one of the greatest monuments of the abuse of intel- 
lectual power upon record. It puts one in mind of the court 
dresses and preposterous fashions of the time, which are grown 
obsolete and disgusting. It is not romantic, but scholastic ; not 
poetry, but casuistry ; not nature, but art, and the worst sort of 
art, which tMnks it can do better than nature. Of the number 
of fine things that are constantly passing through the author's 
mind, there is hardly one that he has not contrived to spoil, and 
to spoil purposely and maliciously, in order to aggrandize our 
idea of himself. Out of five hundred folio pages, there are 
hardly, I conceive, half a dozen sentences expressed simply and 
directly, with the sincere desire to convey the image implied, 
and without a systematic interpolation of the wit, learning, inge- 
nuity, wisdom, and everlasting impertinence of the writer, so as 
to disguise the object, instead of displaying it in its true colours 
and real proportions. Every page is with " centric and eccentric 
scribbled o'er;" his muse is tattooed and tricked out like an 
Indian goddess. He writes a court-hand, with flourishes like a 
schoolmaster ; his figures are wrought in chain-stitch. All his 
thoughts are forced and painful births, and may be said to be 
delivered by the Csesarean operation. At last, they become dis- 
torted and rickety in themselves ; and before they have been 
cramped and twisted and swaddled into lifelessness and deformity. 
Imagine a writer to have great natural talents, great powers of 
memory and invention, an eye for nature, a knowledge of the 
passions, much learning, and equal industry : but that he is so 
full of a consciousness of all this, and so determined to make the 
reader conscious of it at every step, that he becomes a complete 
intellectual coxcomb, or nearly so ; — that he never lets a casual 
observation pass without perplexing it with an endless, running 
commentary, that he never states a feeling without so many 



167 

circumamhages, without so many interlineations and parenthetical 
remarks on all that can be said for it, and anticipations of all that 
can be said against it, and that he never mentions a fact without 
giving so many circumstances, and conjuring up so many thinajs 
that it is like or not like, that you lose the main clue of the story 
in its infinite ramifications and intersections ; and we may form 
some faint idea of ' The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia,' which 
is spun with great labour out of the author's brains, and hangs 
like a huge cobweb over the face of nature ! This is not, as far 
as I can judge, an exaggerated description ; but as near the truth 
as I can make it. The proofs are not far to seek. Take the 
first sentence, or open the volume anywhere and read. I will, 
however, take one of the most beautiful passages, near the be- 
ginning, to show how the subject matter, of which the noblest use 
might have been made, is disfigured by the affectation of the 
style, and the importunate and vain activity of the writer's mind. 
The passage I allude to is the celebrated description of Arcadia. 

" So that the third day after, in the time that the morning did strew roses 
and violets in the heavenly floor against the coming of the sun, the nightin- 
gales (striving one with the other which could in most dainty variety recount 
their wrong-caused sorrow) made them put off their sleep, and rising from 
under a tree (which that night had been their pavilion) they went on tJieir 
journey, which by-and-by welcomed Musidorus' eyes (wearied with the 
wasted soil of Laconia) with welcome prospects. There were hills which 
garnished their proud heights with stately trees : humble valleys whose base 
estate seemed comforted with the refreshing of silver rivers ; meadows ena- 
melled with all sorts of eye- pleasing flowers ; thickets, which being lined with 
most pleasant shade wei-e witnessed so to, by the cheerful disposition of many 
well-tuned birds ; each pasture stored with sheep feeding with sober security, 
while the pretty lambs, with bleating oratory craved the dam's comfort ; here 
a shepherd's boy piping, as though he should never be old : there a young 
shepherdess knitting, and withal singing, and it seemed that her voice com- 
forted her hands to work, and her hands kept time to her voice-music. As 
for the houses of the country (for many houses came under their eye) they 
were scattered, no two being one by the other, and yet not so far off, as that 
it barred mutual succour ; a show, as it were, of an accompaniable solitari- 
ness, and of a civil wildness. I pray you, said Musidorus (then first unseal- 
ing his long-silent lips), what countries be these we pass through, which are 
so divers in show, the one wanting no store, the other having no store but of 
wantl The country, answered Claius, where you were cast ashore, and now 
are passed through, is Laconia ; but this country (where you now set your 
foot) is Arcadia." 



168 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

One would think the very name might have lulled his senses 
to delightful repose in some still, lonely valley, and have laid 
the restless spirit of Gothic quaintness, witticism, and conceit in 
the lap of classic elegance and pastoral simplicity. Here are 
images, too, of touching beauty and everlasting truth that needed 
nothing but to be simply and nakedly expressed to have made a 
picture equal (nay superior) to the allegorical representation of 
' The Four Seasons of Life,' by Giorgione. But no ! He can- 
not let his imagination, or that of the reader, dwell for a moment 
on the beauty or power of the real object. He thinks nothing is 
done, unless it is his doing. He must officiously and gratui- 
tously interpose between you and the subject, as the Cicerone 
of Nature, distracting the eye and the mind by continual un- 
called-for interruptions, analyzing, dissecting, disjointing, murder- 
ing everything, and reading a pragmatical, self-sufficient lecture 
over the dead body of nature. The moving-spring of his mind is 
not sensibility or imagination, but dry, literal, unceasing craving 
after intellectual excitement, which is indifferent to pleasure or 
pain, to beauty or deformity, and likes to owe everything to its 
own perverse efforts, rather than the sense of power in other 
things. It constantly interferes to perplex and neutralize. It 
never leaves the mind in a wise passiveness. In the infancy of 
taste, the froward pupils of art took nature to pieces, as spoiled 
children do a watch, to see what was in it. After taking it to 
pieces they could not, with all their cunning, put it together again, 
so as to restore circulation to the heart, or its living hue to the 
face ! The quaint and pedantic style here objected to was not, 
however, the natural growth of untutored fancy, but an artifi- 
cial excrescence transferred from logic and rhetoric to poetry. 
It was not owing to the excess of imagination, but of the want 
of it, that is, to the predominance of the mere understanding or 
dialectic faculty over the imaginative and the sensitive. It is, 
in fact, poetry degenerating at every step into prose, sentiment 
entangling itself into a controversy, from the habitual leaven of 
polemics and casuistry in the writer's mind. The poet insists 
upon matters of fact from the beauty or grandeur that accom- 
panies them ; our prose-poet insists upon them because they are 
matters of fact, and buries the beauty and grandeur in a heap 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 169 

of common rubbish, " like two grains of wheat in a bushel of 
chaff." The true poet illustrates for ornament or use : the fan- 
tastic pretender only because he is not easy till he can translate 
everything out of itself into something else. Imagination con- 
sists in enriching one idea by another, which has the same feel- 
ing or set of associations belonging to it in a higher or more 
striking degree ; the quaint or scholastic style consists in com- 
paring one thing to another by the mere process of abstraction, 
and the more forced and naked the comparison, the less of har- 
mony or congruity there is in it, the more wire-drawn and am- 
biguous the link of generalization by which objects are brought 
together, the greater is the triumph of the false and fanciful 
style. There was a marked instance of the diiference in some 
lines from Ben Jonson, which I have above quoted, and which, 
as they are alternate examples of the extremes of both in the 
same author, and in the same short poem, there can be nothing 
invidious in giving. In conveying an idea of female softness 
and sweetness, he asks — 

" Have you felt the wool of the beaver, 
Or swan's down ever 1 
Or smelt of the bud of the briar, 
Or the nard in the fire ?" 

Now " the swan's down " is a striking and beautiful image of 
the most delicate and yielding softness ; but we have no associa- 
tions of a pleasing sort with the wool of the beaver. The com- 
parison is dry, hard, and barren of effect. It may establish the 
matter of fact, but detracts from and impairs the sentiment. The 
smell of the "bud of the briar" is a double-distilled essence of 
sweetness : besides, there are all the other concomitant ideas of 
youth, beauty, and blushing modesty, which blend with and 
heighten the immediate feeling : but the poetical reader was not 
bound to know even what nard is (it is merely a learned sub- 
stance, a nonentity to the imagination), nor whether it has a fra- 
grant or disagreeable scent when thrown into the fire, till Ben 
Jonson went out of his way to give him this pedantic piece of in- 
formation. It is a mere matter of fact or of experiment ; and 
while the experiment is making in reality or fancy, the sentiment 
12 



170 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

stands still ; or even taking it for granted in the literal and scien- 
tific sense, we are where we were ; it does not enhance the pas- 
sion to he expressed : we have no love for the smell of nard in 
the fire, but we have an old, a long cherished one from infancy, 
for the bud of the briar. Sentiment, as Mr. Burke said of no- 
bility, is a thing of inveterate prejudice ; and cannot be created, 
as some people (learned and unlearned) are inclined to suppose, 
out of fancy or out of anything by the wit of man. The artifi- 
cial and natural style do not alternate in this way in the ' Area- 
dia :' the one is but the Helot, the eyeless drudge of the other. 
Thus even in the above passage, which is comparatively beauti- 
ful and simple in its general structure, we have " the bleating 
oratory" of lambs, as if anything could be more unlike oratory 
than the bleating of lambs. We have a young shepherdess knit- 
ting, whose hands keep time not to her voice, but to her " voice- 
music," which introduces a foreign and questionable distinction, 
merely to perplex the subject ; we have meadows enamelled with 
all the sorts of " eye-pleasing flowers," as if it were necessary 
to inform the reader that flowers pleased the eye, or as if they 
did not please any other sense : we have valleys refreshed •' with 
silver streams," an epithet that has nothing to do with the re- 
freshment here spoken of: we have " an accompaniable solitari- 
ness and a civil wildness," which are a pair of very laboured 
antitheses ; in fine, we have " want of store, and store of want." 

Again, the passage describing the shipwreck of Pyrochles has 
been much and deservedly admired : yet it is not free from the 
same inherent faults. 

" But a little way off they saw the mast (of the vessel) whose proud height 
now lay along, like a widow having lost her mate, of whom she held her 
honour." [This needed explanation.] " But upon the mast they saw a young 
man (at least if it were a man) bearing show of about eighteen years of age, 
who sat (as on horseback) having nothing upon him but his shirt, which be- 
ing wrought with blue silk and gold, had a kind of resemblance to the sea," 
[this is a sort of alliteration in natural history,] " on which the sun [then near 
his western home] did shoot some of his beams. His hair [which the young 
men of Greece used to wear very long] was stirred up and down with the 
wind, which seemed to have a sport to play with it, as the sea had to kiss his 
feet; himself full of admirable beauty, set forth by the strangeness both of his 
seat and gesture ; for, holding his head up full of unmoved majesty, he held a 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 17] 



sword aloft with his fair arm, which often he waved about his crown as 
though he would threaten the world in that extremity." 

If the original sin of alliteration, antithesis, and metaphysical 
conceit could be weeded out of this passage, there is hardly a 
more heroic one to be found in prose or poetry. 

Here is one more passage marred in the making. A shep- 
herd is supposed to say of his mistress, 

" Certainly, as her eyelids are more pleasant to behold than two white kids 
climbing up a fair tree and browsing on its tenderest branches, and yet are 
nothing compared to the day-shining stars contained in them ; and as her 
breath is more sweet than a gentle south-west wind, which comes creepino" 
over flowery fields and shadowed waters in the extreme heat of summer; and 
yet is nothing compared to the honey-flowing speech that breath doth carry ; 
no more all that our eyes can see of her [though when they have seen her 
what else they shall ever see is but dry stubble after clover grass], is to be 
matched with the flock of unspeakable virtues laid up delightfully in that best 
builded fold." 

Now here are images of singular beauty and of Eastern ori- 
ginality and daring, followed up with enigmatical or unmeanintr 
common-places, because he never knows when to leave off, and 
thinks he can never be too wise or too dull for his reader. He 
loads his prose Pegasus like a pack-horse, with all that comes, 
and with a number of little trifling circumstances, that fall off, 
and you are obliged to stop to pick them up by the way. He 
cannot give his imagination a moment's pause, thinks nothing 
done while any thing remains to do, and exhausts nearly all that 
can be said upon the subject, whether good, bad, or indifferent. 
The above passages are taken from the beginning of the • Arca- 
dia,' when the author's style was hardly yet formed. The fol- 
lowing is a less favourable, but fairer specimen of the work. It 
is the model of a love-letter, and is only longer than that of 
Adriano de Armada, in ' Love's Labour's Lost.' 

" Most blessed paper, which shall kiss that hand, whereto all blessedness 
is in nature a servant, do not yet disdain to carry with thee the woful words 
of a miser now despairing : neither be afraid to appear before her, bearing the 
base title of the sender. For no sooner shall that divine hand touch thee, but 
tliat thy baseness shall be turned to most high preferment. Therefore mourn 
boldly my ink ; for while she looks upon you your blackness will shine : cry 



172 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

out boldly my lamentation, for while she reads you your cries will be music. 
Say then (O happy messenger of a most unhappy message) that the too soon 
born and too late dying creature, which dares not speak, no, not look, no, 
not scarcely think (as from his miserable self unto her heavenly highness), 
only presumes to desire thee (in the time that her eyes and voice do exalt 
thee) to say, and in this manner to say, not from him, oh, no, that were not 
fit, but of him, thus much unto her sacred judgment. O you, the only honour 
to women, to men the admiration, you that being armed by love, defy him that 
armed you in this high estate wherein you have placed me" [i. e. the letter], 
•' yet let me remember him to whom I am bound for bringing me to your pre- 
sence : and let me remember him, who (since he is yours, how mean soever 
he be) it is reason you have an account of him. The wretch (yet your wretch) 
though with languishing steps runs fast to his grave; and will you suffer a 
temple (how poorly built soever, but yet a temple of your deity) to be rased'? 
But he dieth : it is most true, he dieth : and he in whom you live, to obey you, 
dieth. Whereof though he plain, he doth not complain : for it is a harm, but 
no wrong, which he hath received. He dies, because in woeful language all 
his senses tell him, that such is your pleasure : for if you will not that he live, 
alas, alas, what foUoweth, what followeth of the most ruined Dorus, but his 
end 1 End, then, evil destined Dorus, end ; and end, thou woeful letter, end ; 
for it sufficeth her wisdom to know, that her heavenly will shall be accom- 
plished." — Lib. ii., p. 117. 

This style relishes neither of the lover nor the poet. Nine- 
tenths of the work are written in this manner. It is in the very 
manner of those books of gallantry and chivalry, which, with 
the labyrinths of their style, and " the reason of their unreasona- 
bleness," turned the fine intellects of the Knight of La Mancha. 
In a word (and not to speak it profanely), the Arcadia is a riddle, 
a rebus, an acrostic in folio : it contains about 4,000 far-fetched 
similes, and 6,000 impracticable dilemmas; about 10,000 reasons 
for doing nothing at all, and as many more against it ; number- 
less alliterations, puns, questions and commands, and other figures 
of rhetoric ; about a score good passages that one may turn to 
with pleasure, and the most involved, irksome, improgressive. and 
heteroclite subject that ever was chosen to exercise the pen or 
patience of man. It no longer adorns the toilette or lies upon 
the pillow of Maids of Honour and Peeresses in their own right 
(the Pamelas and Philocleas of a later age), but remains upon 
the shelves of the libraries of the curious in long works and 
great names, a monument to show that the author was one of the 
ablest men and worst writers of the age of Elizabeth. 

His Sonnets, inlaid in the Arcadia, are jejune, far-fetched and 



ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, ETC. 173 



frigid. I shall select only one that has been much commended. 
It is ' To the Highway, where his Mistress had passed,' a strange 
subject, but not unsuitable to the author's genius. 

'•' Highway, since you my chief Parnassus be, 
And that my Muse (to some ears not unsweet) 
Tempers her words to trampling horses' feet 
More oft than to a chamber melody ; 
Now blessed you bear onward blessed me 
To her, where I my heart safe left shall meet ; 
My Muse, and I must you of duty greet 
With thanks and wishes, wishing thankfully. 
Be you still fair, honoured by public heed. 
By no encroachment wrong'd, nor time forgot: 
Nor blamed for blood, nor shamed for sinful deed; 
And that you know, I envy you no lot 
Of highest wish, I wish you so much bliss. 
Hundreds of years you Stella's feet may kiss." 

The answer of the Highway has not been preserved, but the 
sincerity of this appeal must no doubt have moved the stocks 
and stones to rise and sympathize. His ' Defence of Poesy' is 
his most readable performance ; there he is quite at home, in a 
sort of^ special pleader's office, where his ingenuity, scholastic 
subtlety, and tenaciousness in argument stand him in good stead ; 
and he brings off poetry with flying colours ; for he was a man 
of wit, of sense, and learning, though not a poet of true taste or 
unsophisticated genius. 



174 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



LECTURE VIL 

Character of Lord Bacon's Works — compared as to style with Sir Thomas 
Brown and Jeremy Taylor. 

Lord Bacon has been called (and justly) one of the wisest of 
mankind. The word wisdom characterizes him more than any 
other. It was not that he did so much himself to advance the 
knowledge of maij or nature, as that he saw what others had 
done to advance it, and what was still wanting to its full accom- 
plishment. He stood upon the high 'vantage ground of genius 
and learning ; and traced, " as in a map the voyager his course," 
the long devious march of human intellect, its elevations and de- 
pressions, its windings and its errors. He had a " large discourse 
of reason, looking before and after." He had made an exact 
and extensive survey of human acquirements : he took the gauge 
and metre, the depths and soundings of human capacity. He 
was master of the comparative anatom}^ of the mind of man, of 
the balance of power among the different faculties. He had 
thoroughly investigated and carefully registered the steps and 
processes of his own thoughts, with their irregularities and fail- 
ures, their liabilities to wrong conclusions, either from the diffi- 
culties of the subject, or from moral causes, from prejudice, 
indolence, vanity, from conscious strength or weakness ; and he 
applied this self-knowledge on a mighty scale to the general 
advances or retrograde movements of the aggregate intellect of 
the world. He knew well what the goal and crown of moral 
and intellectual power was, how far men had fallen short of it, 
and how they came to miss it. He had an instantaneous percep- 
tion of the quantity of truth or good in any given system ; and 
of the analogy of any given result or principle to others of the 
same kind scattered through nature or history. His observations 
take in a larger range, have more profundity from the fineness 



CHARACTER OP LORD BACON'S WORKS. 175 



of his tact, and more comprehension from the extent of his 
knowledge, along the line of which his imagination ran with 
equal celerity and certainty, than any other person's whose 
writings I know. He however seized upon these results, rather 
by intuition than by inference : he knew them in their mixed 
modes and combined effects, rather than by abstraction or ana- 
lysis, as he explains them to others, not by resolving them into 
their component parts and elementary principles, so much as Dy 
illustrations drawn from other things operating in like manner, 
and producing similar results ; or, as he himself has finely ex- 
pressed it, " by the same footsteps of nature treading or printing 
upon several subjects or matters." He had great sagacity of 
observation, solidity of judgment and scope of fancy ; in this 
resembling Plato and Burke, that he was a popular philosopher 
and philosophical declaimer. His writings have the gravity of 
prose with the fervour and vividness of poetry. His sayings 
have the effect of axioms, and are at once striking and self-evi- 
dent. He views objects from the greatest height, and his re- 
flections acquire a sublimity in proportion to their profundity, as 
in deep wells of water we see the sparkling of the highest fixed 
stars. The chain of thought reaches to the centre, and ascends 
the brightest heaven of invention. Reason in him works like an 
instinct ; and his slightest suggestions carry the force of convic- 
tion. His opinions are judicial. His induction of particulars is 
alike wonderful for learning and vivacity, for curiosity and dignity, 
and an all-prevading intellect binds the whole together in a 
graceful and pleasing form. His style is equally sharp and sweet, 
flowing and pithy, condensed and expansive, expressing volumes 
in a sentence, or amplifying a single thought into pages of rich, 
glowing, and delightful eloquence. He had great liberality from 
seeing the various aspects of things (there was nothing bigotted, 
or intolerant, or exclusive about him), and yet he had firmness 
and decision from feeling their weight and consequences. His 
character was then an amazing insight into the limits of human 
knowledge and acquaintance with the landmarks of human in- 
tellect, so as to trace its past history or point out the path to future 
inquirers, but when he quits the ground of contemplation of what 
others have done or left undone to project himself into future 



176 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



discoveries, he becomes quaint and fantastic, instead of original. 
His strength was in reflection, not in production ; he was the 
surveyor, not the builder of the fabric of science. He had not 
strictly the constructive faculty. He was the principal pioneer 
in the march of modern philosophy, and has completed the edu- 
cation and discipline of the mind for the acquisition of truth, by 
explaining all the impediments or furtherances that can be applied 
to it or cleared out of its way. In a word, he was' one of the 
greatest men this country has to boast, and his name deserves 
to stand, where it is generally placed, by the side of those of our 
greatest writers, whether we consider the variety, the strength, 
or the splendour of his faculties, for ornament or use. 

His ' Advancement of Learning' is his greatest work ; and 
next to that I like the 'Essays;' for the 'Novum Organum' is 
more laboured and less effectual than it might be. I shall give 
a few instances from the first of these chiefly, to explain the scope 
of the above remarks. 

' The Advancement of Learning' is dedicated to James I., and 
he there observes, with a mixture of truth and flattery, which 
looks very much like a bold irony — 

" I am well assured that this which I shall say is no amplification at all, 
but a positive and measured truth : which is, that there hath not been, since 
Christ's time, any king or temporal monarch which hath been so learned in 
all literature and erudition, divine and human (as your majesty). For let a 
man seriously and diligently revolve and peruse the succession of the Empe- 
rors of Rome, of which Caesar the Dictator, who lived some years before 
Christ, and Marcus Antoninus, were the best-learned; and so descend to the 
Emperors of Grecia, or of the West, and then to the lines of France, Spain, 
England, Scotland, and the rest, and he shall find this judgment is truly 
made. For it seemeth much in a king, if by the compendious extractions of 
other men's wits and labour, he can take hold of any superficial ornaments 
and shows of learning, or if he countenance and prefer learning and learned 
men ; but to drink indeed of the true fountain of learning, nay, to have such 
a fountain of learning in himself, in a king, and in a king born, is almost a 
miracle." 

To any one less wrapped up in self-sufficiency than James, 
the rule would have been more staggering than the exception 
could have been gratifying. But Bacon was a sort of prose- 
laureate to the reigning prince, and his loyalty had never been 
suspected. 



CHARACTER OF LORD BACON'S WORKS. 177 



In recommending learned men as fit counsellors in a state, he 
thus points out the deficiencies of the mere empiric or man of 
business, in not being provided against uncommon emergencies. 
— " Neither," he says, " can the experience of one man's life 
furnish examples and precedents for the events of another man's 
life. For, as it happeneth sometimes, that the grand-child, or 
other descendant, resembleth the ancestor more than the son ; so 
many times occurrences of present times may sort better with 
ancient examples, than with those of the latter or immediate 
times ; and lastly, the wit of one man can no more countervail 
learning, than one man's means can hold way with a common 
purse." — This is finely put. It might be added, on the other 
hand, by way of caution, that neither can the wit or opinion of 
one learned man set itself up, as it sometimes does, in opposition 
to the common sense or experience of mankind. 

When he goes on to vindicate the superiority of the scholai 
over the mere politician in disinterestedness and inflexibility of 
principle, by arguing ingeniously enough — " The corrupter sort 
of mere politiques, that have not their thoughts established by 
learning in the love and apprehension of duty, nor never look 
abroad into universality, do refer all things to themselves and 
thrust themselves into the centre of the world, as if all times 
should meet in them and their fortunes, never caring, in all tem- 
pests, what becomes of the ship of estates, so they may save 
themselves in the cock-boat of their own fortune ; whereas men 
that feel the weight of duty, and know the limits of self-love, use 
to make good their places and duties, though with peril." — I can 
only wish that the practice were as constant as the theory is 
plausible, or that the time gave evidence of as much stability 
and sincerity of principle in well-educated minds as it does of 
versatility and gross egotism in self-taught men. I need not 
give the instances, " they will receive" (in our author's phrase) 
" an open allowance:" but I am afraid that neither habits of ab- 
straction nor the want of them will entirely exempt men from a 
bias to their own interest ; that it is neither learning nor ignorance 
that thrusts us into the centre of our own little world, but that 
it is nature that has put man there ! 

His character of the school-men is perhaps the finest philoso- 



178 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

phical sketch that was ever drawn. After observing that there 
are " two marks and badges of suspected and falsified science ; 
the one, the novelty and strangeness of terms, the other the strict- 
ness of positions, which of necessity doth induce oppositions, and 
so questions and altercations" — he proceeds — " Surely like as 
many substances in nature which are solid, do putrefy and cor- 
rupt into worms ; so it is the property of good and sound know- 
ledge to putrefy and dissolve into a number of subtle, idle, un- 
wholesome, and (as I may term them) venniculate questions ; 
which have, indeed, a kind of quickness and life of spirit, but no 
soundness of matter or goodness of quality. This kind of de- 
generate learning did chiefly reign amongst the school-men, who, 
having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure, and 
small variety of reading ; but their wiis being shut up in the 
cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle their dictator) as 
their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries 
and colleges, and knowing little history, either of nature or time, 
did out of no great quantity of matter, and infinite agitation of 
wit, spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning which are 
extant in their books. For the wit and mind of man, if it work 
upon matter, which is the contemplation of the creatures of God, 
worketh according to the stufl^, and is limited thereby ; but if it 
work upon itself, as the spider worketh his web, then it is end- 
less, and brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning, admirable for 
the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit." 
And a little further on, he adds — "Notwithstanding, certain it 
is, that if those school-men, to their great thirst of truth and un- 
wearied travel of wit, had joined variety and universality of 
reading and contemplation, they had proved excellent lights to 
the great advancement of all learning and knowledge ; but, as 
they are, they are great undertakers indeed, and fierce with 
dark keeping. But, as in the inquiry of the divine truth, their 
pride inclined to leave the oracle of God's word, and to varnish 
in the mixture of their own inventions ; so in the inquisition of 
nature, they ever left the oracle of God's works, and adored the 
deceiving and deformed images which the unequal mirror of 
their own minds, or a few received authors or principles did re- 
present unto them." 



CHARACTER OF LORD BACON'S WORKS. 179 

One of his acutest (I might have said profoundest) remarks 
relates to the near connection between deceiving and being de- 
ceived. Volumes might be written in explanation of it. " This 
vice, therefore," he says, " brancheth itself into two sorts ; de- 
light in deceiving, an aptness to be deceived, imposture and cre- 
dulity ; which, although they appear to be of a diverse nature, 
the one seeming to proceed of cunning, and the other of sim- 
plicity, yet certainly they do for the most part concur. For, as 
the verse noteth, Percontatorem fugito, nam garrulus idem est ; 
an inquisitive man is a prattler : so upon the like reason, a cre- 
dulous man is a deceiver ; as we see it in fame, that he that will 
easily believe rumours will as easily augment rumoursyand add 
somewhat to them of his own, which Tacitus wisely noteth, when 
he saith Fingunt simul creduntque, so great an affinity hath fiction 
and belief." 

I proceed to his account of the causes of error, and directions 
for the conduct of the understanding, which are admirable both 
for their speculative ingenuity and practical use : 

" The first of these," says Lord Bacon, " is the extreme affection of two 
anxieties : the one antiquity, the other novelty, wherein it seemeth the 
children of time do take after the nature and malice of the father. For as he 
devoureth his children, so one of them seeketh to devour and suppress the 
other ; while antiquity envieth there should be new additions, and novelty can- 
not be content to add, but it must defoce. Surely, the advice of the prophet 
is the true direction in this respect, Slate super vias antiquas, el videte qucsnavi 
sit via recta et bona^ et ambulate in ea. Antiquity deserveth that reverence, 
that men should make a stand thereupon, and discover what is the best way, 
but when the discovery is well taken, then to take progression. And to speak 
truly," he adds, " Antiquitas secidi juventus mundi. These times are the ancient 
times when the world is ancient ; and not those which we count ancient or- 
dine retrogrado, by a computation backwards from ourselves. 

" Another error, induced by the former, is a distrust that anything should 
be now to be found out which the world should have missed and passed over 
so long time, as if the same objection were to be made to time that Lucian 
makes to Jupiter and other the Heathen Gods, of which he wondereth that 
they begot so many children in old age, and begot none in his time, and asketh 
whether they were become septuagenary, or whether the law Papia made 
against old men's marriages had restrained them. So it seemeth men doubt, 
lest time was become past children and generation; wherein, contrary-wise, 
we see commonly the levity and unconstancy of men's judgments, which, till 
a matter be done, wonder that it can be done, and as soon as it is done wonder 
again that it was done no sooner, as we see in the expedition of Alexander into 



180 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

Asia, which at first was prejudged as a vast and impossible enterprise, and 
yet afterwards it pleaseth Livy to make no more of it than this, nil aliud quam 
bene misus vana contevinere. And the same happened to Columbus in his 
western navigation. But in intellectual matters it is much more common ; as 
may be seen in most of the pi'opositions in Euclid, which till they be demon- 
strate, they seem strange to our assent, but being demonstrate, our mind ac- 
cepteth of tiiem by a kind of relation (as the lawyers speak,) as if we had 
known them before. 

" Another is an impatience of doubt and haste to assertion without due and 
mature suspension of judgment. For the two ways of contemplation are 
not unlike the two ways of action, commonly spoken of by the ancients. The 
one plain and smooth in the beginning, and in the end impassable ; the other 
rough and troublesome in the entrance, but, after a while, fair and even ; so it 
is in contemplation, if a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in 
doubts ; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certeiin- 
ties. 

"Another error is in the manner of the tradition or delivery of knowledge, 
which is for the most part magistral and peremptory, and not ingenuous and 
faithful ; in a sort, as may be soonest believed, and not easiliest examined. 
It is true, that in compendious treatises for practice, that form is not to be dis- 
allowed. But in the true handling of knowledge, men ought not to fall either 
on the one side into the vein of Velleius the Epicurean : nil tavi metuens quam 
ne dubitare aliqua de re vidcretur; nor, on the other side, into Socrates his 
ironical doubting of all things, but to propound things sincerely, with more 
or less asseveration ; as they stand in a man's own judgment, proved more or 



Lord Bacon in this part "declares, " that it is not his purpose 
to enter into a laudative of learning or to make a hymn to the 
Muses," yet he has gone near to do this in the following obser- 
vations on the dignity of knowledge. He says, after speaking 
of rulers and conquerors : — 

" But the commandment of knowledge is yet higher than the command- 
ment over the will : for it is a commandment over the reason, belief, and un- 
derstanding of man, which is the highest part of the mind, and giveth law to 
the will itself. For there is no power on earth which setteth a throne or chair 
of estate in the spirits and souls of men, and in their cogitations, imaginations, 
opinions, and beliefs, but knowledge and learning. And therefore we see the 
detestable and extreme pleasure that arch-heretics and false prophets and im- 
postors are transported with, when they once find in themselves that they have 
a superiority in the faith and conscience of men ; so great, as if they have 
once tasted of it, it is seldom seen that any torture or persecution can make 
them relinquish or abandon it. But as this is that which the author of the 
Revelations calls the depth or profoundness of Satan; so by argument of con- 
traries, the just and lawful sovereignty over men's understanding, by force of 



CHARACTER OF LORD BACON'S WORKS. 181 

truth rightly interpreted, is that which approacheth nearest to the simihtude 

of the Divine rule Let us conclude with the dignity and 

excellency of knowledge and learning in that whereunto man's nature 
doth most aspire, which is immortality or continuance : for to this tend- 
eth generation, and raising of houses and families ; to this tendeth build- 
ings, foundations, and monuments ; to this tendeth the desire of memory, 
fame, and celebration, and in effect the strength of all other humane desires ; 
we see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than 
the monuments of power or of the hands. For, have not the verses of Homer 
continued twenty-five hundred years and more, without the loss of a syllable 
or letter ; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities, have been 
decayed and demolished'? It is not possible to have the true pictures or statues 
of Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar, no, nor of the kings or great personages of 
much later years. For the originals cannot last: and the copies cannot but 
lose of the life and truth. But the images of men's wits and knowledge re- 
main in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual 
renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate 
still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infi- 
nite actions and opinions in succeeding ages. So that, if the invention of the 
ship was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place 
to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their 
fruits, how much more are letters to be magnified, which, as ships, pass through 
the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, 
illuminations, and inventions the one of the other"?" 

Passages of equal force and beauty might be quoted from al- 
most every page of this work and of the Essays. 

Sir Thomas Brown and Bishop Taylor were two prose-writers 
in the succeeding age, who, for pomp and copiousness of style, 
might be compared to Lord Bacon. In all other respects they 
were opposed to him and to one another. — As Bacon seemed to 
bend all his thoughts to the practice of life, and to bring home 
the light of science to " the bosoms and businesses of men," Sir 
Thomas Brown seemed to be of opinion that the only business of 
life was to think, and that the proper object of speculation was, 
by darkening knowledge, to breed more speculation, and " find 
no end in wandering mazes lost." He chose the incomprehen- 
sible and impracticable as almost the only subjects fit for a lofty 
and lasting contemplation, or for the exercise of a solid faith. 
He cried out for an oh altUudo beyond the heights of revelation, 
and posed himself with apocryphal mysteries, as the pastime of 
his leisure hours. He pushes a question to the utmost verge of 



182 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



conjecture, that he may repose on the certainty of doubt ; and 
he removes an object to the greatest distance from him, that he 
may take a high and abstracted interest in it, consider it in its 
relation to the sum of things, not to himself, and bewilder his 
understanding in the universality of its nature, and the inscru- 
tableness of its origin. His is the sublime of indifference ; a 
passion for the abstruse and imaginary. He turns the world 
round for his amusement, as if it was a globe of paste-board. 
He looks down on sublunary affairs as if he had taken his sta- 
tion in one of the planets. The Antipodes are next-door neigh- 
bours to him, and Doomsday is not far off. With a thought he 
embraces both the poles ; the march of his pen is over the great 
divisions of geography and chronology. Nothing touches him 
nearer than humanity. He feels that he is mortal only in the 
decay of nature, and the dust of long-forgotten tombs. The 
finite is lost in the infinite. The orbits of the heavenly bodies 
or the history of empires are to him but a point in time or a 
speck in the universe. The great. Platonic year revolves in one 
of his periods. Nature is too little for the grasp of his style. 
He scoops an antithesis out of fabulous antiquity, and rakes up 
an epithet from the sweepings of Chaos. It is as if his books 
had dropt from the clouds, or as if Friar Bacon's head could 
speak. He stands on the edge of the world of sense and reason, 
and gains a vertigo by looking down on impossibilities and 
chimeras. Or he busies himself with the mysteries of the 
Cabala, or the enclosed secrets of the heavenly quincunxes, as 
children are amused with tales of the nursery. The passion of 
curiosity (the only passion of childhood) had in him survived to 
old age, and had superannuated his other faculties. He moral- 
izes and grows pathetic on a mere idle fancy of his own, as if 
thought and being were the same, or as if " all this world were 
one glorious lie." For a thing to have ever had a name is suf- 
ficient warrant to entitle it to respectful belief, and to invest it 
with all the rights of a subject and its predicates. He is super- 
stitious, but not bigoted ; to him all religions are much the same, 
and he says that he should not like to have lived in the time of 
Christ and the Apostles, as it would have rendered his faith too 
gross and palpable. His gossiping egotism and personal char- 



CHARACTER OF SIR T. BROWN AS A WRITER. 183 



acter have been preferred unjustly to Montaigne's. He had no 
personal character at all but the peculiarity of resolvino- all the 
other elements of his being into thought, and of trying experi- 
ments on his own nature in an exhausted receiver of idle and 
unsatisfactory speculations. All that he " differences himself 
by," to use his own expression, is this moral and physical indif- 
ference. In describing himself he deals only in negatives. He 
says he has neither prejudices nor antipathies to manners, habits, 
climate, food, to persons or things ; they were alike acceptable 
to him as they afforded new topics for reflection ; and he even 
professes that he could never bring himself heartily to hate the 
devil. He owns in one place of the Rellgio Medici, that "he 
could be content if the species were continued like trees," and 
yet he declares that this was from no aversion to love, or beauty, 
or harmony ; and the reasons he assigns to prove the orthodoxy 
of his taste in this respect is, that he was an admirer of the 
music of the spheres ! He tells us that he often composed a 
comedy in his sleep. It would be curious to know the subject 
or the texture of the plot. It must have been something like 
Nabbes's " Mask of Microcosmus,' of which the dramatis per- 
SOTUB have been already given ; or else a misnomer, like Dante's 
'Divine Comedy of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory.' He was 
twice married, as if to show his disregard even for his own 
theory; and he had a hand in the execution of some old women 
for witchcraft, I suppose to keep a decorum in absurdity, and to 
indulge an agreeable horror at his own fantastical reveries on 
the occasion. In a word, his mind seemed to converse chiefly 
with the intelligible forms, the spectral apparitions of things ; he 
delighted in the preternatural and visionary, and he only existed 
at the circumference of his nature. He had the most intense 
consciousness of contradictions and non-entities, and he decks 
them out in the pride and pedantry of words, as if they were 
the attire of his proper person : the categories hang about his 
neck like the gold chain of knighthood, and he " walks gowned" 
in the intricate folds and swelling drapery of dark sayings and 
impenetrable riddles ! 

I will give one gorgeous passage to illustrate all this, from 
his ' Urn-Burial, or Hydriotaphia.' He digs up the urns of 



184 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

some ancient Druids with the same ceremony and devotion as 
if they had contained the hallowed relics of his dearest friends ; 
and certainly we feel (as it has been said) the freshness of the 
mould, and the breath of mortality, in the spirit and force of his 
style. The conclusion of this singular and unparallelled per- 
formance is as follows : 

" What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he 
hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all 
conjecture. What time the persons of these Ossuaries entered the famous 
nations of the dead, and slept with princes and counsellors, might admit a 
wide solution. But who were the pioprietors of these bones, or what bodies 
these ashes made up, were a question above antiquarianism : not to be resolved 
by man, nor easily perhaps by spirits, except we consult the provincial guar- 
dians, or tutelary observators. Had they made as good provision for their 
names, as they have done for their reliques, they had not so grossly erred in 
the art of perpetuation. But to subsist in bones, and be but pyramidally ex- 
tant, is a fallacy in duration. Vain ashes, which in the oblivion of names, 
persons, times, and sexes, have found unto themselves a fruitless continua- 
tion, and only arise unto late posterity, as emblems of mortal vanities; anti- 
dotes against pride, vain-glory, and madding vices. Pagan vain-glories, which 
thought the world might last for ever, had encouragement for ambition, and 
finding no Atropos unto the immortality of their names, were never dampt 
with the necessity of oblivion. Even old ambitions had the advantage of 
ovirs, in the attempts of their vain-glories, who, acting early, and before the 
probable meridian of time, have, by this time, found great accomplishment of 
their designs, whereby the ancient heroes have already outlasted their monu- 
ments and mechanical preservations. But in this latter scene of time we can- 
not expect such mummies unto our memories, when ambition may fear the 
prophecy of Elias, and Charles the Fifth can never hope to live within two 
Methuselahs of Hector. 

" And therefore restless inquietude for the diuturnity of our memories unto 
present considerations, seems a vanity almost out of date, and superannuated 
pieces of folly. We cannot hope to live so long in our names as some have 
done in their persons : one face of Janus holds no proportion unto the other. 
'Tis too late to be ambitious. The great mutations of the world are acted, or 
time may be too short for our designs. To extend our memories by monu- 
ments, whose death we daily pray for, and whose duration we cannot hope, 
without injury to our expectations in the advent of the last day, were a con-* 
tradiction to our beliefs. We, whose generations are ordained in this setting 
part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations. And being 
necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally consti- 
tuted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consi- 
deration of that duration which maketh pyramids pillars of snow, and all 
that's past a moment. 



CHARACTER OF SIR T. BROWN AS A WRITER. 185 



" Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortal right- 
lined circle must conclude and shut up all. There is no antidote against the 
opium of time, which temporarily considereth all things; our fathers find their 
graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our 
survivors. Grave-stones tell truth scarce forty years : generations pass while 
some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks. To be read by bare in- 
scriptions like many in Gruter, to hope for eternity by enigmatical epithets, or 
first letters of our names, to be studied by antiquaries, who we were, and have 
new names given us like many of the mummies, are cold consolations unto 
the students of perpetuity, even by everlasting languages. 

" To be content that times to come should only know there was such a 
man, not caring whether they knew more of him, was a frigid ambition in 
Cardan; disparaging his horoscopal inclination and judgment of himself, who 
cares to subsist like Hippocrates' patients, or Achilles' horses in Homer, under 
naked nominations without deserts and noble acts, which are the balsam of 
our memories, the Entelechia and soul of our subsistences. To be nameless 
in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history. The Canaanitish woman lives 
more happily without a name, than Herodias with one. And who had not 
rather have been the good thief, than Pilate % 

" But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with 
the memory of men without distinction to merit of pei-petuity. Who can but 
pity the founder of the pyramids ? Hcrostratus lives that burnt the temple 
of Diana, he is almost lost that built it; time hath spared the epitaph of 
Adrian's horse, confounded that of himself In vain we compute our felici- 
ties by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equal durations ; and 
Thersites is like to live as long as Agamemnon, without the favour of the 
everlasting register. Who knows whether the best of men be known 1 or 
whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand re- 
membered in the known account of time 1 the first man had been as unknown 
as the last, and Methuselah's long life had been his only chronicle. 

" Oblivion is not to be hired : the greater part must be content to be as 
though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in tne record 
of man. Twenty-seven names make up the first story, and the recorded 
names ever since contain not one living century. The number of the dead 
long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, 
and who knows when was the equinox 1 Every hour adds unto that current 
arithmetic, which scarce stands one moment. And since death must be the 
Lucina of life, and even Pagans could doubt whether thus to live, were to 
die ; since our longest sun sets at right descensions, and makes but winter 
arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, and 
have our light in ashes ; since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying 
mementos, and time, that grows old itself, bids us hope no long duration : 
diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation. 

" Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with 
memory a great part even of our living beings ; we slightly remember our fe- 
licities, and the smartest strokes of affliction leave but short smart upon us. 
13 



186 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



Sense endureth no extremities, and son-ows destroy us or themselves. Ta 
weep into stones are fables. Afflictions induce callosities, which are slippery, 
or fall like snow upon us, which, notwithstanding, is no unhappy stupidity. 
To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetful of evils past, is a merciful pro- 
vision in nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil days, a«d 
our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are 
not kept raw by the edge of repetitions. A great part of antiquity contented 
their hopes of subsistency with a transmigration of their souls, A good way 
to continue their memories, while having the advantage of plural successions, 
they could not but act something remarkable in such a variety of beings, and 
enjoying the fame of their passed selves, make accumulation of glory unto 
their last durations. Others, rather than be lost in the uncomfortable night of 
nothing, were content to recede into the common being, and make one particle 
of the public soul of all things, which was no more than to return into their 
unknown and divme original again. Egyptian ingenuity was more unsatis- 
fied, conserving their bodies in sweet consistences, to attend the return of their 
souls. But all was vanity, feeding the wind, and folly. The Egyptian mum- 
mies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. 
Mummy is become merchandize, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold 
for balsams. 

" In vain do individuals hope for immortality, or any patent from oblivion, 
in preservations below the moon : men have been deceived even in their flat- 
teries above the sun, and studied conceits to perpetuate their names in heaven. 
The various cosmography of that part hath already varied the names of con- 
trived constellations ; Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osiris in the Dog-star. 
While we look for incorruption in the heavens, we find they are but like 
the earth ; durable in their main bodies, alterable in their parts ; whereof beside 
comets and new stars, perspectives begin to tell tales. And the spots that 
wander about the sun, with Phaeton's favour, would make clear conviction. 

"There is nothing immortal but immortality; whatever hath no beginning 
may be confident of no end. All others have a dependent being, and within 
the reach of destruction, which is the peculiar of that necessary essence that 
cannot destroy itself; and the highest strain of omnipotency to be so power- 
fully constituted, as not to suffer even from the power of itself. But the sufli- 
ciency of Christian immortality frustrates all earthly glory, and the quality of 
either state after death makes a folly of posthumous memory. God, who can 
only destroy our souls, and hath assured our resurrection, either of our bodies 
or names, hath directly promised no duration. Wherein there is so much of 
chance, that the boldest expectants have found unhappy frustration ; and to 
hold long subsistence, seems but a scape in oblivion. But man is a noble 
animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities 
and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery, in the in- 
famy of his nature. 

" Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us. A small 
fire sufficeth for life, great flames seemed too little after death, while men 
vainly affected precious pyres, and to burn like Sardanapalus ; but the wisdom 



CHARACTER OF SIR T. BROWN AS A WRITER. 187 

of funeral laws found the folly of prodigal blazes, and reduced undoing fires 
unto the rule of sober obsequies, wherein few could be so mean as not to pro- 
vide wood, pitch, a nnourner, and an urn. 

" Five languages secured not the epitaph of Gordianus ; the man of God 
lives longer without a tomb than any by one, invisibly interred by angels, and 
adjudged to obscurity, though not without some marks directing human dis- 
covery. Enoch and Elias, without either tomb or burial, in an anomalous 
state of being, are the great examples of perpetuity, in their lori§ and living 
memory, in strict account being still on this side death, and 'having a late 
part yet to act on this stage of earth. If in the decretory term of the world 
we shall not all die, but be changed, according to received translation, the last 
day will make but few graves ; at least quick resurrections will anticipate 
lasting sepultures ; some graves will be opened before they be quite closed, 
and Lazarus be no wonder. When many that feared to die shall groan that 
they can die but once, the dismal state is the second and living death, when 
life puts despair on the damned ; when men shall wish the covering of moun- 
tains, not of monuments, and annihilation shall be courted. 

" While some have studied monuments, others have studiously declined 
them ; and some have been so vainly boisterous, that they durst not acknow- 
ledge their graves ; wherein Alaricus seems most subtle, who had a river 
turned to hide his bones at the bottom. Even Sylla, that thought himself safe 
in his urn, could not prevent revenging tongues and stones thrown at his 
monument. Happy are they whom privacy makes innocent, who deal so 
with men in this world that they are not afraid to meet them in the next, — who, 
when they die, make no commotion among the dead, and are not touched with 
that poetical taunt of Isaiah. 

" Pyramids, arches, obelisks, were but the irregularities of vain-glory, and 
wild enormities of ancient magnanimity. But the most magnanimous reso- 
lution rests in the Christian religion, which trampleth upon pride, and sits on 
the neck of ambition, humbly pursuing that infallible perpetuity, unto which 
all others must diminish their diameters and be poorly seen in angles of 
contingency. 

" Pious spirits, who passed their days in raptures of futurity, made little 
more of this world than the world that was before it, while they lay obscure 
in the chaos of pre-ordination, and night of their fore-beings. And if any have 
been so happy as truly to understand Christian annihilation, ecstasies, exolution, 
liquefaction, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, gustation of God, and in- 
gression into the divine shadow, tliey have already had a handsome anticipa- 
tion of heaven ; the gloiy of the world is surely over, and the earth in ashes 
unto them. 

"To subsist in lasting monuments, to live in their productions, to exist in 
their names, and predicament of chimeras, was large satisfaction unto old ex- 
pectations, and made one part of their Elysiums, But all this is nothing in 
the metaphysics of true belief To live indeed is to be again ourselves, which 
being not only a hope but an evidence in noble believers: 'tis all one to lie 
in St. Innocent's church-yard as in the saiids of Egypt ; ready to be anything, 



188 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

in the ecstacy of being ever, and as content with six foot as the moles of Adri- 
anus." 

I subjoin the following account of this extraordinary writer's 
style, said to be written in a blank leaf of his works by Mr. 
Coleridge : 

" Sir Thomas Brown is among my first favourites. Rich in 
various knowledge, exuberant in conceptions and conceits ; con- 
templative, imaginative, often truly great and magnificent in his 
style and diction, though, doubtless, too often big, stiff, and hyper- 
latinistic : thus I might, without admixture of falsehood, de- 
scribe Sir T. Brown ; and my description would have this fault 
only, that it would be equally, or almost equally, applicable to 
half a dozen other writers, from the beginning of the reign of 
Elizabeth to the end of the reign of Charles the Second. He is 
indeed all this ; and what he has more than all this, and peculiar 
to himself, I seem to convey to my own mind in some measure, 
by saying that he is a quiet and sublime enthusiast, with a strong 
tinge of the fantast ; the humourist constantly mingling with, and 
flashing across the philosopher, as the darting colours in shot- 
silk play upon the main dye. In short, he has brains in his 
head, which is all the more interesting for a little twist in the 
brains. He sometimes reminds the reader of Montaigne ; but 
from no other than the general circumstance of an egotism com- 
mon to both, which, in Montaigne, is too often a mere amusing 
gossip, a chit-chat story of whims and peculiarities that lead to 
nothing ; but which, in Sir Thomas Brown, is always the result 
of a feeling heart, conjoined with a mind of active curiosity, the 
natural and becoming egotism of a man, who, loving other 
men as himself, gains the habit and the privilege of talking about 
himself as familiarly as about other men. Fond of the curious, 
and a hunter of oddities and strangenesses, while he conceives 
himself with quaint and humorous gravity, an useful inquirer 
into physical truths and fundamental science, he loved to contem- 
plate and discuss his own thoughts and feelings, because he 
found by comparison with other men's, that they, too, were curi- 
osities ; and so, with a perfectly graceful, interesting ease, he 
put them, too, into his museum and cabinet of rarities. In very 
truth, he was not mistaken, so completely does he see every thing 



CHARACTER OF SIR T. BROWN AS A WRITER. 189 

in a light of his own ; reading nature neither by sun, moon, nor 
candle-light, but by the light of the fairy glory around his own 
head ; that you might say, that nature had granted to him in 
perpetuity, a patent and monopoly for all his thoughts. Read 
his Hydriotajphia above all, and, in addition to the peculiarity, 
the exclusive Sir Thomas Browness of all the fancies and modes 
of illustration, wonder at, and admire, his entireness in every 
subject which is before him. He is totus in illo, he follows it, he 
never wanders from it, and he has no occasion to wander ; for 
whatever happens to be his subject, he metamorphoses all nature 
into it. In that ' Hydriotaphia,' or treatise on some urns dug up 
in Norfolk — how earthy, how redolent of graves and sepulchres 
is every line ! You have now dark mould ; now a thighbone ; 
now a skull ; then a bit of a mouldered coffin ; a fragment of 
an old tombstone, with moss in its hie jacet ; a ghost, a winding 
sheet ; or the echo of a funeral psalm wafted on a November 
wind : and the gayest thing you shall meet with shall be a silver 
nail, or gilt anno domini, from a perished coffin top ! — The very 
same remark applies in the same force to the interesting, though 
far less interesting, treatise on the ' Quincuncial Plantations of 
the Ancients,' the same entireness of subject ! Quincunxes in 
heaven above ; quincunxes in earth below ; quincunxes in 
deity ; quincunxes in the mind of man ; quincunxes in tones, in 
optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in every thing ! In 
short, just turn to the last leaf of this volume, and read out 
aloud to yourself the seven last paragraphs of chapter 5th, be- 
ginning with the words, ' More considerable.' But it is time 
for me to be in bed. In the words of Sir T. Brown (which will 
serve as a fine specimen of his manner,) ' But the quincunxes 
of Heaven (the hyades, or Jive stars about the horizon, at midnight 
at that time) run low, and it is time we close the five parts of 
knowledge ; we are unwilling to spin out our waking thoughts 
into the phantoms of sleep, which often continue precogitations, 
making cables of cobwebs, and wildernesses of handsome groves. 
To keep our eyes open longer, were to act our antipodes ? The 
huntsmen are up in Arabia ; and they have already passed their 
first sleep in Persia.' Think you, that there ever was such a 
reason given before for going to bed at midnight ; to wit, that if 



190 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

we did not, we should be acting the part of our antipodes ! And 
then, 'THE HUNTSMEN ARE UP IN ARABIA,' — what life, what 
fancy ! Does the whimsical knight give us thus the essence of 
gunpowder tea, and call it an opiate ?* 

Jeremy Taylor was a writer as different from Sir Thomas 
Brown as it was possible for one writer to be from another. He 
•\fas a dignitary of the church, and except in matters of casuistry 
and controverted points, could not be supposed to enter upon 
speculative doubts, or give a loose to a sort of dogmatical scep- 
ticism. He had less thought, less "stuff of the conscience," less 
"to give us pause," in his impetuous oratory, but he had equal 
fancy — not the same vastness and profundity, but more richness 
and beauty, more warmth and tenderness. He is as rapid, as 
flowing, and endless, as the other is stately, abrupt, and concen- 
trated. The eloquence of the one is like a river, that of the other 
is more like an aqueduct. The one is as sanguine, as the other 
is saturnine in the temper of his mind. Jeremy Taylor took 
obvious and admitted truths for granted, and illustrated them 
with an inexhaustible display of new and enchanting imagery. 
Sir Thomas Brown talks in sum-totals : Jeremy Taylor enume- 
rates all the particulars of a subject. He gives every aspect it 
will bear, and never " cloys with sameness." His characteristic 
is enthusiastic and delightful amplification. Sir Thomas Brown 

* Sir Thomas Brown has it, " The huntsmen are up in America," but Mr. 
Coleridge prefers reading Arabia. I do not think his account of the Urn- 
Burial very happy. Sir Thomas can be said to be " wholly in his subject," 
only because he is wholly out of it. There is not a word in the * Hydriota- 
phia' about " a thigh-bone, or a skull, or a bit of mouldered coffin, or a tomb- 
stone, or a ghost, or a winding-sheet, or an echo," nor is " a silver nail or a 
gilt anno domini the gayest thing you shall meet with." You do not meet 
with them at all in the text ; nor is it possible, either from the nature of the 
subject, or of Sir T. Brown's mind, that you should ! He chose the subject 
of Urn-Burial, because it was " one of no mark or likelihood," totally free 
from the romantic prettinesses and pleasing poetical common-places with which 
Mr. Coleridge has adorned it, and because, being " without form and void," it 
gave unlimited scope to his high-raised and shadowy imagination. The 
motto of this author's compositions might be — " De apparentibus et tion existen- 
tibus eadem est ratio. He created his own materials : or to speak of him in his 
own language, " he saw nature in the elements of its chaos, and discerned his 
favourite notions in the great obscurity of nothing !" 



CHARACTER OF JEREMY TAYLOR. 191 

gives the beginning and end of things, that you may judge of 
their place and magnitude : Jeremy Taylor describes their quali- 
ties and texture, and enters into all the items of the debtor and 
creditor account between life and death, grace and nature, faith 
and good works. He puts his heart into his fancy. He does not 
pretend to annihilate the passions and pursuits of mankind in the 
pride of philosophic indifference, but treats them as serious and 
momentous things, warring with conscience and the soul's health, 
or furnishing the means of grace and hopes of glory. In his 
writings, the frail stalk of human life reclines on the bosom of 
eternity. His ' Holy Living and Dying' is a divine pastoral. 
He writes to the faithful followers of Christ, as the shepherd pipes 
to his flock. He introduces touching and heart-felt appeals to 
familiar life ; condescends to men of low estate ; and his pious 
page blushes with modesty and beauty. His style is prismatic. 
It unfolds the colours of the rainbow ; it floats like the bubble 
through the air ; it is like innumerable dew-drops that glitter on 
the face of morning, and tremble as they glitter. He does not 
dig his way underground, but slides upon ice, borne on the 
winged car of fancy. The dancing light he throws upon objects 
is like an Aurora Borealis, playing betwixt heaven and earth — • 

" Where pure Niemi's faery banks arise, 

And fringed with roses Tenglio rolls its stream." 

His exhortations to piety and virtue are a gay memento mori. 
He mixes up death's-heads and amaranthine flowers ; makes life 
a procession to the grave, but crowns it with gaudy garlands, 
and " rains sacrificial roses" on its path. In a word, his writings 
are more like fine poetry than any other prose whatever ; they 
are a choral song in praise of virtue, and a hymn to the Spirit of 
the Universe. I shall give a few passages, to show how feeble 
and inefficient this praise is. 

The ' Holy Dying' begins in this manner ; — 

" Man is a bubble. He is born in vanity and sin ; he conies into the world 
like morning mushrooms, soon thrusiing up their heads into the air, and con- 
versing with their kindred of the same production, and as soon they turn into 
dust and forgetfulness ; some of them without any other interest in the affairs 
vf the world, but that they made their parents a little glad, and very sorrowful. 



192 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

Others ride longer in the storm ; it may be until seven years of vanity be ex- 
pired, and then peradventure the sun shines hot upon their heads, and they fall 
into the shades below, into the cover of death and darkness of the grave to hide 
them. But if the bubble stands the shock of a bigger drop, and outlives the 
chances of a child, of a careless nurse, of drowning in a pail of water, of being 
overlaid by a sleepy servant, or such little accidents, then the young man dances 
like a bubble empty and gay, and shines like a dove's neck, or the image of a 
rainbow, which hath no substance, and whose very imagery and colours are 
fantastical; and so he dances out the gaiety of his youth, and is all the while 
in a storm, and endures, only because he is not knocked on the head by a drop 
of bigger rain, or crushed by the pressure of a load of indigested meat, or 
quenched by the disorder of an ill-placed humour; and to preserve a man alive 
in the midst of so many chances and hostilities, is as great a miracle as to create 
him ; to preserve him from rushing into nothing, and at first to draw him up 
from nothing, were equally the issues of an Almighty power." 

Another instance of the same rich continuity of feeling, and 
transparent brilliancy in working out an idea, is to be found in 
bis description of the dawn and progress of reason : 

" Some are called at age at fourteen, some at one-and-twenty, some never; 
but all men late enough ; for the life of a man comes upon him slowly and in- 
sensiby. But as when the sun approaches towards the gates of the morning, 
he first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of darkness, 
and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark to matins, and by-and-by gilds 
the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden 
horns, like those which decked the brows of Moses, when he was forced to 
wear a veil, because himself had seen the face of God ; and still, while a man 
tells the story, the sun gets up higher, till he shows a fair face and a full light, 
and then he shines one whole day, under a cloud often, and sometimes weep- 
ing great and little showers, and sets quickly ; so is a man's reason and his 
life." 

This passage puts one in mind of the rising dawn and kindling 
skies in one of Claude's landscapes. Sir Thomas Brown has 
nothing of' this rich finishing and exact gradation. The genius 
of the two men differed, as that of the painter from the mathema- 
tician. The one measures objects, the other copies them. The 
one shows that things are nothing out of themselves, or in rela- 
tion to the whole : the one, what they are in themselves and in 
relation to us. Or the one may be said to apply the telescope of 
the mind to distant bodies ; the other looks at nature in its infinite 
minuteness and glossy splendour through a solar microscope. 

In speaking of Death, our author's style assumes the port and 



CHARACTER OF JEREMY TAYLOR, 193 

withering smile of the King of Terrors. The following are 
scattered passages on this subject. 

" It is the same harmless thing that a poor shepherd suffered yesterday or a 
maid-servant to-day ; and at the same time in which you die, in that very night 
a thousand creatures die with you, some wise men, and many fools ; and the 
wisdom of the first will not quit him, and the folly of the latter does not make 
him unable to die." .... 

" I have read of a fair young German gentleman, who, while living, often 
refused to be pictured, but put off the importunity of his friends' desire by giving 
way that after a few days' burial, they might send a painter to his vault, and 
if they saw cause for it, draw the image of his death vfito the life. They did 
so, and found his face half eaten, and his midriff and back-bone full of serpents ; 
and so he stands pictured among his armed ancestors." .... 

" It is a mighty change that is made by the death of every person, and it is 
visible to us, who are alive. Reckon but from the sprightfulness of youth and 
the fair cheeks and full eyes of childhood, from the vigorousness and strong 
flexure of the joints of five-and-twenty, to the hollowness and dead paleness, to 
tlie loathsomeness and horror of a three days' burial, and we shall perceive the 
distance to be very great and very strange. But so have I seen a rose newly 
springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was fair as the morning, and 
full with the dew of heaven, as the lamb's fleece ; but when a ruder breath had 
forced open its virgin modesty, and dismanded its too youthful and unripe re- 
tirements, it began to put on darkness and to decline to softness and the symp- 
toms of a sickly age, it bowed the head and broke its stalk, and at night, having 
lost some of its leaves, and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and 
out-worn faces. So does the fairest beauty change, and it will be as bad with 
you and me ; and then what servants shall we have to wait upon us in the 
grave 1 What friends to visit us '? What officious people to cleanse away the 
moist and unwholesome cloud reflected upon our faces from the sides of the 
weeping vaults, which are the longest weepers for our funerals ?" 

" A man may read a sermon, the best and most passionate that ever man 
preached, if he shall but enter into the sepulchres of kings. In the same Escu- 
rial where the Spanish princes live in greatness and power, and decree war or 
peace, they have wisely placed a cemetery where their ashes and their glory 
shall sleep till time shall be no more : and where our kings have been crowned, 
their ancestors lie interred, and they must walk over their grandsires head to take 
his crown. There is an acre sown with royal seed, the copy of the greatest 
change from rich to naked, from ceiled roofs to arched coffins, from living like 
gods to die like men. There is enough to cool the flames of lust, to abate 
the heights of pride, to appease the itch of covetous desires, to sully and dash 
out the dissembling colours of a lustful, artificial, and imaginary beauty. There 
the warlike and the peaceful, the fortunate and the miserable, the beloved and 
the despised princes mingle their dust, and pay down their symbol of mortality, 
ana icll a.11 flip, world that wKen we die, our ashes shall be equal to kings, and 



194 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

our accounts easier, and our pains for our crimes shall be less.* To my appre- 
hension, it is a sad record which is left by Athenaeus concerning Ninus the 
great Assyrian monarch, whose life and death is summed up in these words : 
' Ninus the Assyrian had an ocean of gold, and other riches more than the sand 
in the Caspian sea ; he never saw the stars, and perhaps he never desired it; he 
never stirred up the holy fire among the Magi : nor touched his god with the sa- 
cred rod according to the laws: he never offered sacrifice, nor worshipped the 
deity, nor administered justice, nor spake to the people ; nor numbered them : but 
he was most valiant to eat and drink, and having mingled his wines, he threw the 
rest upon the stones. This man is dead, behold his sepulchre, and now hear 
•where Ninus is. Sometime I was Ninus, and drew the breath of a living man, 
but now am nothing but clay, I have nothing but what I did eat, and what I 
served to myself in lust is all my portion : the wealth with which I was blessed, 
my enemies meeting together shall carry away, as the mad Thyades carry a raw 
goat. I am gone to hell : and when I went thither, I neither carried gold, nor 
horse, nor silver chariot. I that wore a mitre, am now a Uttle heap of dust.' " 

He who wrote in this manner also wore a mitre, and is now a 
heap of dust: but when the name of Jeremy Taylor is no longer 
remembered with reverence, genius will have become a mockery, 
and virtue an empty shade ! 



* The above passage is an inimitably fine paraphrase of some lines on tha 
tombs in Westminster Abbey by F. Beaumont. It shows how near Jeremy 
Taylor's style was to poetiy, and how well it weaves in with it. 

" Mortality, behold, and fear, 

What a charge of flesh is here ! 

Think how many royal bones 

Sleep within this heap of stones: 

Here they lie, had realms and lands, 

Who now want strength to stir their hands. 

Where from their pulpits, sealed in dust, 

They preach ' In greatness is no trust.' 

Here's an acre sown indeed 

With the richest, royal'st seed 

That the earth did e'er suck in, 

Since the first man died for sin. 

Here the bones of birth have cried, 

Though gods they were, as men they died. 

Here are sands, ignoble things, 

Dropp'd from the ruin'd sides of kings. 

Here's a world of pomp and state 

BuiicJ in dust, once dead by fate." 



ON ANCIENT AND MODERN LITERATURE. 195 



LECTURE VIII. 

On the Spirit of Ancient and Modern Literature — On the German Drama, 
contrasted with that of the Age of Elizabeth. 

Before I proceed to the more immediate subject of the present 
Lecture, I wish to say a few words of one or two writers in our 
own time, who have imbibed the spirit and imitated the language 
of our elder dramatists. Among these I may reckon the inge- 
nious author of ' The Apostate' and ' Evadne,' who, in the last- 
mentioned play, in particular, has availed himself with much 
judgment and spirit of the tragedy of 'The Traitor,' by old 
Shirley. It would be curious to hear the opinion of a professed 
admirer of the Ancients, and captious despiser of the Moderns, 
with respect to this production, before he knew it was a copy of 
an old play. Shirley himself lived in the time of Charles L and 
died in the beginning of Charles IL ;* but he had formed his 
style on that of the preceding age, and had written the greatest 
number of his plays in conjunction with Jonson, Decker, and 
Massinger. He was " the last of those fair clouds that on the 
bosom of bright honour sailed in long procession, beautiful 
and calm." The name of Mr. Tobin is familiar to every lover 
of the drama. His ' Honey-Moon' is evidently founded on 
'The Taming of a Shrew,' and Duke Aranza has been pro- 
nounced by a polite critic to be "an elegant Petruchio." The 
plot is taken from Shakspeare ; but the language and sentiments, 
both of this play and of ' The Curfew,' bear a more direct re- 
semblance to the flowery tenderness of Beaumont and Fletcher, 
who were, I believe, the favourite study of our author. Mr. 
Lamb's ' John Woodvil' may be considered as a dramatic frag- 
ment, intended for the closet rather than the stage. It would 
sound oddly in the lobbies of either theatre, amidst the noise and 

* He and his wife both died from fright, occasioned by the great fire of 
London in 1665, and He buried in St. Giles's churchyard. 



196 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

glare and bustle of resort ; but " there where we have treasured 
up our hearts," in silence and in solitude, it may claim and find 
a place for itself. It might be read with advantage in the still 
retreats of Sherwood Forest, where it would throw a new-born 
light on the green, sunny glades ; the tenderest flower might 
seem to drink of the poet's spirit, and " the tall deer that paints 
a dancing shadow of his horns in the swift brook," might seem 
to do so in mockery of the poet's thought. Mr. Lamb, with a 
modesty often attendant on fine feeling, has loitered too long in 
the humbler avenues leading to the temple of ancient genius, 
instead of marching boldly up to the sanctuary, as many with 
half his pretensions would have done : " but fools rush in, where 
angels fear to tread." The defective or objectionable parts of 
this production are imitations of the defects of the old writers : 
its beauties are his own, though in their manner. The touches 
of thought and passion are often as pure and delicate as they 
are profound ; and the character of his heroine Margaret is per- 
haps the finest and most genuine female character out of Shaks- 
peare. This tragedy was not critic-proof: it had its cracks and 
flaws and breaches, through which the enemy marched in tri- 
umphant. The station which he had chosen was not indeed a 
walled town, but a straggling village, which the experienced en- 
gineers proceeded to lay waste ; and he is pinned down in more 
than one Review of the day, as an exemplary warning to indis- 
creet writers, who venture beyond the pale of periodical taste 
and conventional criticism. Mr. Lamb was thus hindered by 
the taste of the polite vulgar from writing as he wished ; his 
own taste would not allow him to write like them : and he (per- 
haps wisely) turned critic and prose-writer in his own defence. 
To say that he has written better about Shakspeare, and about 
Hogarth, than anybody else, is saying little in his praise. A 
gentleman of the name of Cornwall, who has lately published a 
volume of Dramatic Scenes, has met with a very different recep- 
tion, but I cannot say that he has deserved it. He has made no 
sacrifice at the shrine of fashionable affectation or false glitter. 
There is nothing common-place in his style to soothe the com- 
placency of dulness, nothing extravagant to startle the grossness 
of ignorance. He writes with simplicity, delicacy, and fervour; 



ON ANCIENT AND MODERN LITERATURE. 197 

continues a scene from Shakspeare, or works out a hint from 
Boccacio, in the spirit of his originals, and though he bows with 
reverence at the altar of those great masters, he keeps an eye 
curiously intent on nature, and a mind awake to the admoni- 
tions of his own heart. As he has begun, so let him proceed. 
Any one who will turn to the glowing and richly, coloured con- 
clusion of ' The Falcon,' will, I think, agree with me in this 
wish ! 

There are four sorts or schools of tragedy with which I am 
acquainted. The first is the antique or classical. This con- 
sisted, I apprehend, in the introduction of persons on the stage, 
speaking, feeling, and acting according to nature, that is, accord- 
ing to the impression of given circumstances on the passions and 
mind of man in those circumstances, but limited by the physical 
conditions of time and place, as to its external form, and to a 
certain dignity of attitude and expression, selection in the figures, 
and unity in their grouping, as in a statue or bas-relief. The 
second is the Gothic or romantic, or, as it might be called, the 
historical or poetical tragedy, and differs from the former, only 
in having a larger scope in the design and boldness in the exe- 
cution ; that is, it is the dramatic representation of nature and 
passion emancipated from the precise imitation of an actual 
event in place and time, from the same fastidiousness in the 
choice of the materials, and with the license of the epic and fan- 
ciful form added to it in the range of the subject and the decora- 
tions of language. This is particularly the style or school of 
Shakspeare and of the best writers of the age of Elizabeth, and 
the one immediately following. Of this class, or genus, the 
tragedie hoiirgeoise is a variety, and the antithesis of the classical 
form. The third sort is the French or common- place rhetorical 
style, which is founded on the antique as to its form and subject 
matter ; but instead of individual nature, real passion, or ima- 
gination growing out of real passion and the circumstances of 
the speaker, it deals only in vague, imposing, and laboured de- 
clamations, or descriptions of nature, dissertations on the passions, 
and pompous flourishes which never entered any head but the 
author's, have no existence in nature which they pretend to iden- 
tify, and are not dramatic at all, but purely didactic. The 



198 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



fourth and last is the German or paradoxical style, which differs 
from the others in representing men as acting not from the im- 
pulse of feeling, or as debating common-place questions of mo- 
rality, but as the organs and mouth-pieces (that is, as acting, 
speaking, and thinking under the sole influence) of certain ex- 
travagant speculative opinions, abstracted from all existing cus- 
toms, prejudices, and institutions. It is my present business to 
speak chiefly of the first and last of these. 

Sophocles differs from Shakspeare as a Doric portico does from 
Westminster Abbey. The principle of the one is simplicity and 
harmony, of the other richness and power. The one relies on 
form or proportion, the other on quantity, and variety, and pro- 
minence of parts. The one owes its charm to a certain union 
and regularity of feeling, the other adds to its effect from com- 
plexity and the combination of the greatest extremes. The clas- 
sical appeals to sense and habit ; the Gothic or romantic strikes 
from novelty, strangeness, and contrast. Both are founded in 
essential and indestructible principles of human nature. We 
may prefer the one to the other, as we choose, but to set up an 
arbitrary and bigotted standard of excellence in consequence of 
this preference, and to exclude either one or the other from poetry 
or art, is to deny the existence of the first principles of the hu- 
man mind, and to war with nature, which is the height of weak- 
ness and arrogance at once. There are some observations on 

o 

this subject in a late number of the ' Edinburgh Review,' from 
which I shall here make a pretty long extract : 

" The most obvious distinction between the two styles, the 
classical and the romantic, is, that the one is conversant with 
objects that are grand or beautiful in themselves, or in conse- 
quence of obvious and universal associations ; the other, with 
those that are interesting only by the force of circumstances and 
imagination. A Grecian temple, for instance, is a classical ob- 
ject : it is beautiful in itself, and excites immediate admiration. 
But the ruins of a Gothic castle have no beauty or symmetry to 
attract the eye ; and yet they excite a more powerful and roman- 
tic interest, from the ideas with which they are habitually asso- 
ciated. If, in addition to this, we are told that this is Macbeth's 
castle, the scene of the murder of Duncan, the interest will be 



ON ANCIENT AND MODERN LITERATURE. igg 



instantly heightened to a sort of pleasing horror. The classical 
idea or form of any thing, it may also be observed, remains always 
the same, and suggests nearly the same impressions ; but the as- 
sociations of ideas belonging to the romantic character may vary 
infinitely, and take in the whole range of nature and accident. 
Antigone, in Sophocles, waiting near the grove of the Furies — 
Electra, in ^Eschylus, offering sacrifice at the tomb of Agamem- 
non — are classical subjects, because the circumstances and the 
characters have a correspondent dignity, and an immediate in- 
terest, from their mere designation. Florimel, in Spenser, where 
she is described sitting on the ground in the Witch's hut, is not 
classical, though in the highest degree poetical and romantic : 
for the incidents and situation are in themselves mean and disa- 
greeable, till they are redeemed by the genius of the poet, and 
converted, by the very contrast, into a source of the utmost 
pathos and elevation of sentiment. Othello's handkerchief is not 
classical, though " there was magic in the web :" — it is only a 
powerful instrument of passion and imagination. Even Lear is 
not classical ; for he is a poor crazy old man, who has nothing 
sublime about him but his afiiictions, and who dies of a broken 
heart. 

" Schlegel somewhere compares the Furies of ^schylus to 
the Witches of Shakspeare — we think without much reason. 
Perhaps Shakspeare has surrounded the weird sisters with asso- 
ciations as terrible, and even more mysterious, strange and fan- 
tastic, than the Furies of ^Eschylus ; but the traditionary beings 
themselves are not so petrific. These are of marble — their look 
alone must blast the beholder; — those are of»air, <)ubbles; and 
though ' so withered and so wild in their attire,' it is their spells 
alone which are fatal. They owe their power to metaphysical 
aid : but the others contain all that is dreadful in their corporeal 
figures. In this we see the distinct spirit of the classical and the 
romantic mythology. The serpents that twine round the head 
of the Furies are not to be trifled with, though they implied no 
preternatural power. The bearded Witches in Macbeth are in 
themselves grotesque and ludicrous, except as this strange devia- 
tion from nature staggers our imagination, and leads us to ex- 
pect and to believe in all incredible things. They appal the la- 



200 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

culties by what they say or do ; — the others are intolerable, even 
to sight. 

" Our author is right in affirming, that the true way to under- 
stand the plays of Sophocles and ^schylus, is to study them 
before the groupes of the Niobe or the Laocoon. If we can 
succeed in explaining this analogy, we shall have solved nearly 
the whole difficulty. For it is certain, that there are exactly the 
same powers of mind displayed in the poetry of the Greeks as in 
their statues. Their poetry is exactly what their sculptors might 
have written. Both are exquisite imitations of nature ; the one 
in marble, the other in words. It is evident that the Greek poets 
had the same perfect idea of the subjects they described as the 
Greek sculptors had of the objects they represented ; and they 
give as much of this absolute truth of imitation as can be given 
by words. But in this direct and simple imitation of nature, as 
in describing the form of a beautiful woman, the poet is greatly 
inferior to the sculptor ; it is in the power of illustration, in com- 
paring it to other things, and suggesting other ideas of beauty or 
love, that he has an entirely new source of imagination opened 
to him : and of this power the moderns have made at least a 
bolder and more frequent use than the ancients. The description 
of Helen in Homer is a description of what might have happened 
and been seen, as ' that she moved with grace, and that the old 
men rose up with reverence as she passed;' the description of 
Belphcebe in Spenser is a description of what was only visible to 
the eye of the poet : 

" Upon her eyelids many graces sat, 
Under the shadow of her even brows." 

The description of the soldiers going to battle in Shakspeare, ' all 
plumed like ostriches, like eagles newly baited, wanton as goats, 
wild as young bulls,' is too bold, figurative, and profuse of dazzling 
images, for the mild, equable tone of classical poetry, which never 
loses sight of the object in the illustration. The ideas of the an- 
cients were too exact and definite, too much attached to the mate- 
rial form or vehicle by which they were conveyed, to admit of 
those rapid combinations, those unrestrained flights of fancy, 
which, glancing from heaven to earth, unite the most opposite 



ON ANCIENT AND MODERN LITERATURE. 201 

extremes, and draw the happiest illustrations from things the 
most remote. The two principles of imitation and imagination, 
indeed, are not only distinct, but almost opposite. 

" The great difference, then, which we find between the classi- 
cal and the romantic style, between ancient and modern poetry, 
is, that the one more frequently describes things as they are in- 
teresting ill themselves — the other for the sake of the associations 
of ideas connected with them ; that the one dwells more on the 
immediate impressions of objects on the senses — the other on the 
ideas which they suggest to the imagination. The one is the 
poetry of form, the other of effect. The one gives only what is 
necessarily implied in the subject, the other all that can possibly 
arise out of it. The one seeks to identify the imitatiqn with the 
external object — clings to it — is inseparable from it — is either that 
or nothing ; the other seeks to identify the original impression 
with whatever else, within the range of thought or feeling, can 
strengthen, relieve, adorn, or elevate it. Hence the severity and 
simplicity of the Greek tragedy, which excluded everything 
foreign or unnecessary to the subject. Hence the Unities : for, 
in order to identify the imitation as much as possible with the 
reality, and leave nothing to mere imagination, it was necessary 
to give the same coherence and consistency to the different parts 
of a story, as to the different limbs of a statue. Hence the beauty 
and grandeur of their materials; for, deriving their power over 
the mind from the truth of the imitation, it was necessary that 
the subject which they made choice of, and from which they 
could not depart, should be in itself grand and beautiful. Hence 
the perfection of their execution ; which consisted in giving the 
utmost harmony, delicacy, and refinement to the details of a 
given subject. Now, the characteristic excellence of the moderns 
is the reverse of all this. As, according to our author, the poetry 
of the Greeks is the same as their sculpture ; so, he says, our 
own more nearly resembles painting — where the artist can re- 
lieve and throw back his figures at pleasure — use a greater va- 
riety of contrasts — and where light and shade, like the colours of 
fancy, are reflected on the different objects. The Muse of clas- 
sical poetry should be represented as a beautiful naked figure ; 
the Muse of modern poetry should be represented clothed, and 
14 



THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



with wings. The first has the advantage in point of form ; the 
last in colour and motion. 

' " Perhaps we may trace this difference to something analo- 
gous in physical organization, situation, religion, and manners. 
First, the physical organization of the Greeks seems to have been 
more perfect, more susceptible of external impressions, and more 
in harmony with external nature than ours, who have not the 
same advantages of climate and constitution. Born of a beauti- 
ful and vigorous race, with quick senses and a clear understand- 
ing, and placed under a mild heaven, they gave the fullest de- 
velopment to their external faculties : and where all is perceived 
easily, every thing is perceived in harmony and proportion. It is 
the stern genius of the North which drives men back upon their 
own resources, which makes them slow to perceive, and averse 
to feel, and which, by rendering them insensible to the single, 
successive impressions of things, requires their collective and 
combined force to rouse the imagination violently and unequally. 
It should be remarked, however, that the early poetry of some 
of the Eastern nations has even more of that irregularity, wild 
enthusiasm, and disproportioned grandeur, which has been con- 
sidered as the distinguishing character of the Northern nations. 
" Again, a good deal may be attributed to the state of manners 
■and political institutions. The ancient Greeks were warlike 
tribes encamped in cities. They had no other country than that 
which was enclosed within the walls of the town in which they 
lived. Each individual belonged, in the first instance, to the 
state ; and his relations to it were so close as to take away, in a 
great measure, all personal independence and free-will. Every 
one was mortised to his place in society, and had his station as- 
signed him as part of the political machine, which could only 
subsist by strict subordination and regularity. Every man was, 
as it were, perpetually on duty, and his faculties kept constant 
watch and ward. Energy of purpose and intensity of observa- 
tion became the necessary characteristics of such a state of so- 
ciety ; and the general principle communicated itself from this 
ruling concern for the public, to morals, to art, to language, to 
every thing. The tragic poets of Greece were among her best 
^soldiers j and it is no wonder that they were as severe in their 



ON ANCIENT AND MODERN LITERATURE. 



203 



poetry as in their discipline. Their swords and their styles 
carved out their way with equal sharpness. After all, however, 
the tragedies of Sophocles, which are the perfection of the classi- 
cal style, are hardly tragedies in our sense of the word.* They 
do not exhibit the extremity of human passion and suffering. 
The object of modern tragedy is to represent the soul utterly 
subdued as it were, or at least convulsed and overthrown, by 
passion or misfortune. That of the ancients was to show how 
the greatest crimes could be perpetrated with the least remorse, 
and the greatest calamities borne with the least emotion. Firm- 
ness of purpose and calmness of sentiment are their leading 
characteristics. Their heroes and heroines act and suffer as if 
they were always in the presence of a higher power, or as if hu- 
man life itself were a religious ceremony, performed in honour 
of the Gods and of the State. The mind is not shaken to its 
centre ; the whole being is not crushed or broken down. Con- 
tradictory motives are not accumulated ; the utmost force of 
imagination and passion is not exhausted to overcome the repug- 
nance of the will to crime ; the contrast and combination of out- 
ward accidents are not called in to overwhelm the mind with the 
whole weight of unexpected calamity. The dire conflict of the 
feelings, the desperate struggle with fortune, are seldom there. 
All is conducted with a fatal composure ; prepared and submit- 
ted to with inflexible constancy, as if Nature were only an in- 
strument iQ the hands of Fate. 

" This state of things was afterwards continued under the Ro- 
man empire. In the ages of chivalry and romance, which, after 
a considerable interval, succeeded its dissolution, and which 
have stamped their character on modern genius and literature, 
all was reversed. Society was again resolved into its compo- 
nent parts ; and the world was, in a manner, to begin anew. 
The ties which bound the citizen and the soldier to the^te be- 
ing loosened, each person was thrown back into the circM of the 
domestic affections, or left to pursue his doubtful way to fame 
and fortune alone. This interval of time might be accordingly 
supposed to give birth to all that was constant in attachment, ad- 

* The difference in the tone of moral sentiment is the greatest of all others. 



204 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 



venturous in action, strange, wild, and extravagant in invention. 
Human life took the shape of a busy, voluptuous dream, where 
the imagination was now lost amidst ' antres vast and deserts 
idle ;' or suddenly transported to stately palaces, echoing with 
dance and song. In this uncertainty of events, this fluctuation 
of hopes and fears, all objects became dim, confused, and vague. 
Magicians, dwarfs, giants, followed in the train of romance ; and 
Orlando's enchanted sword, the horn which he carried with him, 
and which he blew thrice at Roncesvalles, and Rogero's winged 
horse, were not sufficient to protect them in their unheard-of en- 
counters, or deliver them from their inextricable difficulties. It 
was a return to the period of the early heroic ages ; but tempered 
by the difference of domestic manners, and the spirit of religion. 
The marked difference in the relation of the sexes arose from the 
freedom of choice in women : which, from being the slaves of 
the will and passions of men, converted them into the arbiters of 
their fate, which introduced the modern system of gallantry, and 
first made love a feeling of the heart, founded on mutual affec- 
tion and esteem. The leading virtues of the Christian religion, 
self-denial and generosity, assisted in producing the same effect. 
Hence the spirit of chivalry, of romantic love and honour ! 

" The mythology of the romantic poetry differed from the re- 
ceived religion : both differed essentially from the classical. The 
religion or mythology of the Greeks was nearly allied to their 
poetry : it was material and definite. The Pagan system re- 
duced the gods to the human form, and elevated the powers of 
inanimate nature to the same standard. Statues carved out 
of the finest marble, represented the objects of their religious 
worship in airy porticos, in solemn temples and consecrated 
groves. Mercury was seen ' new lighted on some heaven- 
kissing hill ;' and the Naiad or Dryad came gracefully forth 



as the^ersonified genius of the stream or wood. All was 
subjeCTR to the senses. The Christian religion, on the con- 
trary, is essentially spiritual and abstracted : it is ' the evi- 
dence of things unseen.' In the Heathen mythology, form is 
everywhere predominant; in the Christian, we find only un- 
limited, undefined power. The imagination alone ' broods over 
the immense abyss, and makes it pregnant.' There is, in the 



ON ANCIENT AND MODERN LITERATURE. 205 

habitual belief of an universal, invisible principle of all things, 
a vastness and obscurity which confounds our perceptions, while 
it exalts our piety. A mysterious awe surrounds the doctrines 
of the Christian faith : the infinite is everywhere before us, whe^ 
ther we turn to reflect on what is revealed to us of the divine 
nature or our own. 

" History, as well as religion, has contributed to enlarge the 
bounds of imagination ; and both together, by showing past and fu- 
ture objects at an interminable distance, have accustomed the mind 
to contemplate and take an interest in the obscure and shadowy. 
The ancients were more circumscribed within ' the ignorant 
present time' — spoke only their own language — were conversant 
only with their own customs — were acquainted only with the 
events of their own history. The mere lapse of time then, aided 
by the art of printing, has served to accumulate an endless mass 
of mixed and contradictory materials ; and, by extending our 
knowledge to a greater number of things, has made our particu- 
lar ideas less perfect and distinct. The constant reference to a 
former state of manners and literature is a marked feature in 
modern poetry. We are always talking of the Greeks and 
Romans : — they never said anything of us. This circumstance 
has tended to give a certain abstract elevation, and ethereal re- 
finement to the mind, without strengthening it. We are lost in 
wonder at what has been done, and dare not think of emulating 
it. The earliest modern poets, accordingly, may be conceived 
to hail the glories of the antique world, dawning through the 
dark abyss of time ; while revelation, on the other hand, opened 
its path to the skies. So Dante represents himself as conducted 
by Virgil to the shades below ; while Beatrice welcomes him to 
the abodes of the blest." 

The French are the only people in modern Europe who have 
professedly imitated the ancients ; but from their being utterly 
unlike the Greeks or Romans, they have produced a dramatic 
style of their own, which is neither classical nor romantic. The 
same article contains the following censure of this style : 

" The true poet identifies the reader with the characters he 
represents; the French poet only identifies him with himself. 
There is scarcely a single page of their tragedy which fairly 



206* THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

throws nature open to you. It is tragedy in masquerade. We 
never get beyond conjecture and reasoning — beyond the general 
impression of the situation of the persons — beyond general re- 
flections on their passions — beyond general descriptions of ob- 
jects. We never get at that something more, which is what we 
are in search of, namely, what we ourselves should feel in the 
same situations. The true poet transports you to the scene — 
you see and hear what is passing — you catch, from th^ lips of 
the persons concerned, what lies nearest to their hearts ; — the 
French poet takes you into his closet, and reads you a lecture 
upon it. The chef-d'ceuvres of their stage, then, are, at best, 
only ingenious paraphrases of nature. The dialogue is a tissue 
of common-places, of laboured declamations on human life, of 
learned casuistry on the passions, on virtue and vice, which any 
one else might make just as well as the person speaking ; and 
yet, what the persons themselves would say, is all we want to 
know, and all for which the poet puts them into those situations." 
After the Restoration, that is, after the return of the exiled, 
family of the Stuarts from France, our writers transplanted this 
artificial, monotonous, and imposing common-place style into 
England, by imitations and translations, where it could not be 
expected to take deep root, and produce wholesome fruits, and 
where it has indeed given rise to little but turgidity and rant in 
men of original force of genius, and to insipidity and formality 
in feebler copyists. Otway is the only writer of this school, 
who, in the lapse of a century and a half, has produced a tra- 
gedy (upon the classic or regular model) of indisputable excel- 
lence and lasting interest. The merit of ' Venice Preserved' is 
not confined to its effect on the stage, or to the opportunity it af- 
fords for the display of the powers of the actors in it, of a Jaf- 
fier, a Pierre, a Belvidera : it reads as well in the closet, and 
loses little or none of its power of rivetting breathless attention, 
and stirring the deepest yearnings of affection. It has passages 
of great beauty in themselves (detached from the fable) touches 
of true nature and pathos, though none equal or indeed compar- 
able to what we meet with in Shakspeare and other writers of 
that day ; but the awful suspense of the situations, the conflict 
of duties and passions, the intimate bonds that unite the charac- 



ON ANCIENT AND MODERN LITERATURE. 207 

ters together, and that are violently rent asunder like the parting 
of soul and body, the solemn march of the tragical events to the 
fatal catastrophe that winds up and closes over all, give to this 
production of Otway's Muse a charm and power that bind it like 
a spell on the public mind, and have made it a proud and inse- 
parable adjunct of the English stage. Thomson has given it 
due honour in his feeling verse, when he exclaims : 

" See o'er the stage the Ghost of Hamlet stalks, 
Othelo rages, poor Monimia mourns, 
And Belvidera pours her soul in love." 

There is a mixture of effeminacy, of luxurious and cowardly 
indulgence of his wayward sensibility, in Jaffier's character, 
which is, however, finely relieved by the bold, intrepid villany 
and contemptuous irony of Pierre, while it is excused by the dif- 
ficulties of his situation, and the loveliness of Belvidera ; but in 
the ' Orphan' there is little else but this voluptuous effeminacy 
of sentiment and mawkish distress, which strikes directly at the 
root of that mental fortitude and heroic cast of thought which 
alone makes tragedy endurable — that renders its sufferings pa- 
thetic, or its struggles sublime. Yet there are lines and passages 
in it of extreme tenderness and beauty ; and few persons, I con- 
ceive (judging from my own experience) will read it at a certain 
time of life without shedding tears over it as fast as the " Ara- 
bian trees their medicinal gums." Otway always touched the 
reader, for he had himself a heart. We may be sure that he 
blotted his page often with his tears, on which so many drops 
have since fallen from glistening eyes, " that sacred pity had 
engendered there." He had susceptibility of feeling and warmth 
of genius ; but he had not equal depth of thought or loftiness of 
imagination, and indulged his mere sensibility too much, yielding 
to the immediate impression or emotion excited in his own mind, 
and not placing himself enough in the minds and situations of 
others, or following the workings of nature sufficiently with 
keenness of eye and strength of will into its heights and depths, 
its strongholds as well as its weak sides. The ' Orphan' was 
attempted to be revived some time since, with the advantage of 
Miss O'Neill playing the part of Monimia. It, however, did not 



208 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

entirely succeed (as it appeared at the time) from the plot turn- 
ing all on one circumstance, and that hardly of a nature to be 
obtruded on the public notice. The incidents and characters are 
taken almost literally from an old play by Robert Tailor, called 
' The Hog hath Lost his Pearl.' 

Addison's ' Cato,' in spite of Dennis's criticism, still retains 
possession of the stage with all its unities. My love and admi- 
ration for Addison is as great as any person's, let that other 
person be who he will ; but it is not founded on his ' Cato,' in 
extolling which Whigs and Tories contended in loud applause. 
The interest of this play (bating that shadowy regret that always 
clings to and flickers round the form of free antiquity) is con- 
fined to the declamation, which is feeble in itself, and not heard 
on the stage. I have seen Mr. Kemble in this part repeat the 
' Soliloquy on Death' without a line being distinctly heard ; 
nothing was observable but the thoughtful motion of his lips, and 
the occasional extension of his hand in sign of doubts suggested 
or resolved ; yet this beautiful and expressive dumb-show, with 
the propriety of his costume, and the elegance of his attitude and 
figure, excited the most lively interest, and kept attention even 
more on the stretch, to catch every imperfect syllable or speaking 
gesture. There is nothing, however, in the play to excite ridi- 
cule, or shock by absurdity, except the love scenes, which are 
passed over as what the spectator has no proper concern with ; 
and however feeble or languid the interest produced by a drama- 
tic exhibition, unless there is some positive stumbling-block 
thrown in the way, or gross offence given to an audience, it is 
generally suffered to linger on to a euthanasia, instead of dying 
a violent and premature death. If an author (particularly an 
author of high reputation) can contrive to preserve a uniform de- 
gree of insipidity, he is nearly sure of impunity. It is the mix- 
ture of great faults with splendid passages (the more striking 
from the contrast) that it is inevitable damnation. Every one 
must have seen the. audience tired out and watching for an op- 
portunity to wreak their vengeance on the author, and yet not 
able to accomplish their wish, because no one part seemed more 
tiresome or worthless than another. The philosophic mantle of 
Addison's ' Cato,' when it no longer spreads its graceful folds Oft 



ON ANCIENT AND MODERN LITERATURE. 209 

the shoulders of John Kemble, will I fear fall to the ground ; nor 
do I think Mr. Kean likely to pick it up again, with dauntless 
ambition or stoic pride, like that of Coriolanus. He could not 
play Cato (at least I think not) for the same reason that he will 
play Coriolanus. He can always play a living man ; he cannot 
play a lifeless statue. 

Dryden's plays have not come down to us, except in the col- 
lection of his printed works. The last of them that was on the 
list of regular acting plays was ' Don Sebastian.' 'The Mask 
of Arthur and Emmeline' was the other day revived at one of 
our theatres without much success. ' Alexander the Great' is by 
Lee, who wrote some things in conjunction with Dryden, and who 
had far more power and passion of an irregular and turbulent 
kind, bordering upon constitutional morbidity, and who might 
have done better things (as we see from his ' CEdipus') had not 
his genius been perverted and rendered worse than abortive by 
carrying the vicious manner of his age to the greatest excess. 
Dryden's plays are perhaps the fairest specimen of what this 
manner was. I do not know how to describe it better than by 
saying that it is one continued and exaggerated common-place. 
All the characters are put into a swaggering attitude of dignity, 
and tricked out in the pomp of ostentatious drapery. The 
images are extravagant, yet not far-fetched ; they are outrageous 
caricatures of obvious thoughts ; the language oscillates be- 
tween bombast and pathos : the characters are noisy pretenders 
to virtue, and shallow boasters in vice ; the versification is la- 
boured and monotonous, quite unlike the admirably free and 
flowing rhyme of his satires, in which he felt the true inspiration 
of his subject, and could find modulated sounds to express it. 
Dryden had no dramatic genius either in tragedy or comedy. 
In his plays he mistakes blasphemy for sublimity, and ribaldry 
for wit. He had so little notion of his own powers, that he has put 
Milton's ' Paradise Lost' into dramatic rhyme to make Adam look 
like a fine gentleman ; and has added a double love-plot to ' The 
Tempest,' to " relieve the killing languor and over-laboured 
lassitude" of that solitude of the imagination, in which Shaks- 
peare had left the inhabitants of his Enchanted Island. I will 
give two passages out of ' Don Sebastian,' in illustration of what 
I have said above of this mock-heroic style. 



210 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

Almeyda advising Sebastian to fly from the power of Muley- 
Moloch, addresses him thus : 

" Leave then the luggage of your fate behind; 
To make your flight more easy, leave Almeyda. 
JXor think me left a base, ignoble prey, 
Exposed to this inhuman tyrant's lust. 
My virtue is a guard beyond my strength; 
And death my last defence within my call." 

Sebastian answers very gravely : 

" Death may be called in vain, and cannot come: 
Tyrants can tie him up from your relief: 
Nor has a Christian privilege to die. 
Alas, thou art too young in thy new faith : 
Brutus and Cato might discharge their souls, 
And give them furloughs for another world: 
But we, like sentries, are obliged to stand, 
In stai'less nights, and wait the appointed hour." 

Sebastian then urging her to prevent the tyrant's designs by 
an instant marriage, she says : 

" 'Tis late to join, when we must part so soon. 

Sebastian. Nay, rather let us haste it, ere we part : 
Our souls, for want of that acquaintance here, 
May wander in the starry walks above, 
And, forced on worse companions, miss ourselves." 

In the scene with Muley-Moloch, where she makes interces- 
sion for Sebastian's life, she says : 

" My father's, mother's, brother's death I pardon : 

That's somewhat sure, a mighty sum of murder, 

Of innocent and kindred blood struck off. 

My prayers and penance shall discount for these, 

And beg of Heaven to charge the bill on me : 

Behold what price I offer, and how dear 

To buy Sebastian's life. 

Emperour. Let after-reckonings trouble fearful fools; 
I'll stand the trial of those trivial crimes : 
But since thou begg'st me to prescribe my terms, 
The only I can offer are thy love ; 
And this one day of respite- to resolve. 



ON ANCIENT AND MODERN LITERATURE. 211 

Grant or deny, for thy next word is Fate; 
And Fate is deaf to prayer. 

Almeyda. May heav'n be so 
At thy last breath to thine : I curse thee not: 
For who can better curse the pUxgue or devil 
Than to be what they arel That curse be thine. 
Now do not speak, Sebastian, for you need not, 
But die, for I resign your life : Look, heav'n, 
Almeyda dooms her dear Sebastian's death ! 
But is there heaven, for I begin to doubt % 
The skies are hush'd; no grumbling thunders roll: 
Now take your swing, ye impious: sin, unpunish'd. 
Eternal Providence seems over-watch'd. 
And with a slumbering nod assents to murder . . . 
Farewell, my lost Sebastian ! 
I do not beg, I challenge justice now : 
O Poii^ers, if Kings be your peculiar care, 
Why plays this wretch with your prerogative 1 
Now flash him dead, now crumble him to ashes: 
Or henceforth live confined in your own palace ; 
And look not idly out upon a world 
That is no longer yours." 

These passages, with many like them, will be found in the 
first scene of the third act. 

The occasional striking expressions, such as that of souls at 
the resurrection " fumbling for their limbs," are the laneuaire 
of strong satire and habitual disdain, not proper to tragic or 
serious poetry. 

After Dryden there is no writer that has acquired much repu- 
tation as a tragic poet for the next hundred years. In the hands 
of his successors, the Smiths, the Hughes, the Hills, the Mur- 
phys, the Dr. Johnsons, of the reigns of the first Georges, tra- 
gedy seemed almost afraid to know itself, and certainly did not 
stand where it had done a hundred and fifty years before. It 
had degenerated by regular and studied gradations into the most 
frigid, insipid, and insignificant of all things. It faded to a 
shade, it tapered to a point, " fine by degrees, and beautifully 
less." I do not believe there is a single play of this period 
which could be read with any degree of interest or even patience, 
by a modern reader of poetry, if we except the productions of 
Southern, Lillo and Moore, the authors of ' The Gamester,' 



212 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

* Oroonoko,' and ' Fatal Curiosity,' and who, instead of mount- 
ing on classic stilts and making rhetorical flourishes, went out 
of the established road to seek for truth and nature and effect in 
the commonest life and lowest situations. In short, the only- 
tragedy of this period is that to which their productions gave a 
name, and which has been called in contradistinction by the 
French, and with an express provision for its merits and defects, 
the ' Tragedie bourgeoise.' An anecdote is told of the first of 
these writers by Gray, in one of his letters, dated from Horace 
Walpole's country-seat, about the year 1740, who says, " Old 
Mr. Southern is here, who is now above 80 ; a very agreeable 
«old man, at least I think so when 1 look in his face, and think of 
Isabella and Oroonoko." It is pleasant to see these traits of at- 
tachment and gratitude kept up in successive ^nerations of 
poets to one another, and also to find that the same works of 
genius that have " sent us weeping to our beds," and made us 
" rise sadder and wiser on the morrow morn," have excited just 
the same fondness of affection in others before we were born ; 
and it is to be hoped will do so after we are dead. Our best 
feelings, and those on which we pride ourselves most, and with 
most reason, are perhaps the commonest of all others. 

Up to the present reign, and during the best part of it (with 
another solitary exception, ' Douglas,' which, with all its feeble- 
ness and extravagance, has in its style and sentiments a good 
deal of poetical and romantic beauty,) Tragedy wore the face of 
the Goddess of Dulness in the ' Dunciad,' serene, torpid, sickly, 
lethargic and affected, till it was roused from its trance by the 
blast of the French Revolution, and by the loud trampling of the 
German Pegasus on the English stage, which now appeared as 
pawing to get free from its ancient trammels, and rampant shook 
off" \he incumbrance of all former examples, opinions, prejudices, 
and principles. If we have not been alive and well since this 
period, at least we have been alive, and it is better to be alive 
than dead. The German tragedy (and our own, which is only 
a branch of it,) aims at effect, and produces it often in the highest 
degree ; and it does this by going all the lengths not only of in- 
stinctive feeling, but of speculative opinion, and startling the 
hearer by overturning all the established maxims of society, and 



ON THE GERMAN DRAMA. 213 



setting at nought all the received rules of composition. Jt can- 
not be said of this style that in it " decorum is the principal 
thing." It is the violation of decorum that is its first and last 
principle, the beginning, middle, and end. It is an insult 
and defiance to Aristotle's definition of tragedy. The action 
is not grave, but extravagant: the fable is not probable, but 
improbable : the favourite characters are not only low, but vi- 
cious : the sentiments are such as do not become the person 
into whose mouth they are put, nor that of any other person : 
the language is a mixture of metaphysical jargon and flaring 
prose : the moral is immorality. In spite of all this, a German 
tragedy is a good thing. It is a fine hallucination : it is a noble 
madness, and as there is a pleasure in madness which none but 
madmen know, so there is a pleasure in reading a German play 
to be found in no other. The world have thought so : they go 
to see ' The Stranger,' they go to see ' Lovers' Vows,' and ' Pi- 
zarro,' they have their eyes wide open all the time, and almost 
cry them out before they come away, and therefore they go 
again. There is something in the style that hits the temper of 
men's minds ; that, if it does not hold the mirror up to nature, 
yet " shows the very age and body of the time, its form and 
pressure." It embodies, it sets off and aggrandizes in all the 
pomp of action, in all the vehemence of hyperbolical declama- 
tion, in scenery, in dress, in music, in the glare of the senses, 
and the glow of sympathy, the extreme opinions which are 
floating in our time, and which have struck their roots deep and 
wide below the surface of the public mind. We are no longer * 
as formerly, heroes in warlike enterprize ; martyrs to religious 
faith ; but we are all the partisans of a political system, and de- 
votees to some theory of moral sentiments. The modern style 
of tragedy is not assuredly made up of pompous common- place, 
but it is a tissue of philosophical, political, and moral paradoxes. 
I am not saying whether these paradoxes are true or false : all 
that I mean to state ivS, that they are utterly at variance with old 
opinions, with established rules and existing institutions ; that it 
is this tug of war between the inert prejudice and the startling 
novelty which is to batter it down (first on the stage of the 
theatre, and afterwards on the stage of the world,) that gives the 



214 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

excitement and the zest. We see the natural always pitted 
against the social man ; and the majority, who are not of the 
privileged classes, take part with the former. The hero is a 
sort of metaphysical Orson, armed not with teeth and a' club, 
but with hard sayings and unanswerable sentences, ticketed and 
labelled with extracts and mottos from the modern philosophy. 
This common representative of mankind is a natural son of some 
feudal lord, or wealthy baron : and he comes to claim, as a mat- 
ter of course and of simple equity, the rich reversion of the title 
and estates to which he has a right by the bounty of nature and 
the privilege of his birth. This produces a very edifying scene, 
and the proud, unfeeling, unprincipled baron is hooted from the 
stage. A young woman, a sempstress, or a waiting-maid of 
much beauty and accomplishment, who would not think of 
matching with a fellow of low birth or fortune for the world, 
falls in love with the heir of an immense estate out of pure re- 
gard to his mind and person, and thinks it strange that rank and 
opulence do not follow as natural appendages in the train of sen- 
timent. A lady of fashion, wit, and beauty, forfeits the sanctity 
of her marriage-vow, but preserves the inviolability of her sen- 
timents and character, 

" Pure in the last recesses of the mind" — 

and triumphs over false opinion and prejudice, like gold out of 
the fire, the brighter for the ordeal. A young man turns rob- 
ber and captain of a gang of banditti ; and the wonder is to see 
the heroic ardour of his sentiments, his aspirations after the most 
godlike goodness and unsullied reputation, working their way 
through the repulsiveness of his situation, and making use of 
fortune only as a foil to nature. The principle of contrast and 
contradiction is here made use of, and no other. All qualities 
are reversed : virtue is always at odds with vice, " which shall 
be which :" the internal character and external situation, the 
actions and the sentiments, are never in accord : you are to 
judge of every thing by contraries: those that exalt themselves 
are abased, and those that should be humbled are exalted : the 
high places and strongholds of power and greatness are crum- 
bled in the dust ; opinions totter, feelings are brought into ques- 



ON THE GERMAN DRAMA. 2i5 



tion, and the world is turned upside down, with all things in it ! 
" There is some soul of goodness in things evil" — and there is 
some soul of goodness in all this. The world and every thing in 
it is not just what it ought to be, or what it pretends to be ; or 
such extravagant and prodigious paradoxes would be driven from 
the stage — would meet with sympathy in no human breast, high 
or low, young or old. " There's something rotten in the state of 
Denmark.^^ Opinion is not truth: appearance is not reality: 
power is not beneficence : rank is not wisdom : nobility is not 
the only virtue : riches are not happiness : desert and success 
are different things : actions do not always speak the character 
any more than words. We feel this, and do justice to the ro- 
mantic extravagance of the German Muse. 

In Germany, where this outre style of treating every ihino- es- 
tablished and adventitious was carried to its height, there were, 
as we learn from ' The Sorrows of Werter,' seven-and-twenty 
ranks in society, each raised above the other, and of which the 
one above did not speak to the one below it. Is it wonderful 
that the poets and philosophers of Germany, the discontented men 
of talent, who thought and mourned for themselves and their fel- 
lows, the Goethes, the Lessings, the Schillers, the Kotzebues, felt 
a sudden and irresistible impulse by a convulsive effort to tear 
aside this factitious drapery of society, and to throw off that load 
of bloated prejudice, of maddening pride and superannuated 
folly, that pressed down every energy of their nature and stifled 
the breath of liberty, of truth and genius, in their bosoms ? 
These Titans of our days tried to throw off the dead weight that 
encumbered them, and in so doing, warred not against heaven, 
but against earth. The same writers (as far as I have seen) 
have made the only incorrigible Jacobins, and their school of 
poetry is the only real school of Radical Reform. 

In reasoning, truth and soberness may prevail, on which side 
soever they meet : but in works of imagination novelty has the 
advantage over prejudice ; that which is striking and unheard-of 
over that- which is trite and known before, and that which gives 
unlimited scope to the indulgence of the feelings and the passions 
(whether erroneous or not) over that which imposes a restraint 
upon them. 



216 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. 

I have half trifled with this subject ; and I believe I have 
done so because I despaired of finding language for some old 
rooted feelings I have about it, which a theory could neither give 
nor can it take away. ' The Robbers' was the first play I ever read : 
and the effect it produced upon me was the greatest. It stunned me 
like a blow, and I have not recovered enough from it to describe 
how it was. There are impressions which neither time nor circum- 
stances can efface. Were I to live much longer than I have any 
chance of doing, the books which I read when I was young I can 
never forget. Five-and-twenty years have elapsed since I first 
read the translation of ' The Robbers,' but they have not blotted 
the impression from my mind : it is here still, an old dweller in the 
chambers of the brain. The scene in particular in which Moor 
looks through his tears at the evening sun from the mountain's 
brow, and says in his despair, " It was my wish like him to live, 
like him to die : it was an idle thought, a boy's conceit," took 
fast hold of my imagination, and that sun has to me never set ! 
The last interview in ' Don Carlos' between the two lovers, in 
which the injured bride struggles to burst the prison-house of 
her destiny, in which her hopes and youth lie cofhned, and 
buried, as it were, alive, under the oppression of unspeakable 
anguish, I remember gave me a deep sense of suffering and a 
strong desire after good, which has haunted me ever since. I 
do not like Schiller's later style so well. His ' Wallenstein,' 
which is admirably and almost literally translated by Mr. Cole- 
ridge, is stately, thoughtful, and imaginative : but where is the 
enthusiasm, the throbbing of hope and fear, the mortal struggle 
between the passions ; as if all the happiness or misery of a life 
were crowded into a moment, and the die was to be cast that in- 
stant ? Kotzebue's best work I read first in Cumberland's imita- 
tion of it in ' The Wheel of Fortune ;' and I confess that that 
style of sentiment which seems to make of life itself a long-drawn 
endless sigh, has something in it that pleases me, in spite of rules 
and criticism. Goethe's tragedies are (those that I have seen of 
them, his 'Count Egmont,' ' Stella,' &c.) constructed .upon the 
second or inverted manner of the German stage, with a delibe- 
rate design to avoid all possible effect and interest, and this ob- 
ject is completely accomplished. He is however spoken of with 



ON THE GERMAN DRAMA. 217 



enthusiasm almost amounting to idolatry by his countrymen, and 
those among ourselves who import heavy German criticism into 
this country in shallow, flat-bottomed unwieldly intellects. 
Madame de Stael speaks of one passage in his 'Iphigenia,' 
M'here he introduces a fragment of an old song, which the Furies 
are supposed to sing to Tantalus in Hell, reproaching him with 
the times when he sat with the Gods at their golden tables, and 
with his a;"rer-crimes that hurled him from heaven, at which he 
turns his eyes from his children and hangs his head in mournful 
silence. This is the true sublime. Of all his works I like his 

* Werter' best, nor would I part with it at a venture, even for the 

* Memoirs of Anastasius the Greek,' whoever is the author ; nor 
ever cease to think of the times, " when in the fine summer 
evenings they saw the frank, noble-minded enthusiast coming up 
from the valley," nor of " the high grass that by the light of the 
departing sun waved in the breeze over his grave." 

But I have said enough to give an idea of this modern style, 
com.pared with our own early Dramatic Literature, of which I 
had to treat. I have done : and if I have done no better, the 
fault has been in me, not in the subject. My liking to this grew 
with my knowledge of it: but so did my anxiety to do it justice. 
I somehow felt it as a point of honour not to make my hearers 
think less highly of some of these old writers than I myself did of 
them. If I have praised an author, it was because I liked him : 
if I have quoted a passage, it was because it pleased me in the 
reading : if I have spoken contemptuously of any one, it has been 
reluctantly. It is no easy task, that a writer, even in so humble 
a class as myself, takes upon him ; he is scouted and ridiculed if 
he fails ; and if he succeeds, the enmity and cavils and malice 
with which he is assailed, are just in proportion to his success. 
The coldness and jealousy of his friends not unfrequently keep 
pace with the rancour of his enemies. They do not like you a 
bit the better for fulfilling the good opinion they always enter- 
tained of you. They would wish you to be always promising a 
great deal, and doing nothing, that they may answer for the per- 
formance. That shows their sagacity, and does not hurt their 
vanity. An author wastes his time in painful study and obscure 
researches, to gain a little breath of popularity, meets with nothing 
15 



218 THE AGE OE ELlZABETfl. 

but vexation and disappointment in ninety-nine instances out of a 
hundred ; or when he thinks to grasp the luckless prize, finds it 
not worth the trouble — the perfume of a minute, fleeting as a 
shadow, hollow as a sound : " as often got without merit as lost 
without deserving." He thinks that the attainment of acknow- 
ledged excellence will secure him the expression of tiiose feelings 
in otiiers, which the image and hope of it had excited in his own 
breast, but instead of that he meets with nothing (or scarcely 
nothing) but squint-eyed suspicion, idiot wonder, and grinning 
scorn. It seems hardly worth while to have taken all the pains 
he has been at for this ! 

In youth we borrow patience from our future years : the spring 
of hope gives us courage to act and suffer. A cloud is upon our 
onward path, and we fancy that all is sunshine beyond it. The 
prospect seems endless, because we do not know the end of it. 
We think that life is long, because art is so, and that, because 
we have much to do, it is well worth doing : or that no exertion::! 
•can be too great, no sacrifices too painful, to overcome the difh- 
culties we have to encounter. Life is a continued struggle to be 
what we are not, and to do what we cannot. But as we approach 
the goal, we draw in the reins ; the impulse is less, as we have 
not so far to go ; as we see objects nearer, we become less san- 
guine in the pursuit : it is not the despair of not attaining, so 
much as knowing that there is nothing worth obtaining, and the 
fear of having nothing left even to wish for, that damps our ardour 
and relaxes our efforts ; and if the mechanical habit did not in- 
crease the facility, would, I believe, take away all inclination or 
power to do anything. We stagger on the few remaining paces 
to the end of our journey ; make perhaps one final effort ; and 
are glad when our task is done ! 



THE END. 



WILEY & PUTNAM'S 

LIBRARY OF 

CHOICE Pt E A D J N G 



CHARACTERS OF SHAKSPEARE'S PLAYS. 



H 



CHARACTERS 



SHAKSPEARE'S PLAYS 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 



NEW-YORK : 
WILEY AND PUTNAM, 161 BROADWAY. 

1845. 



e^-^ 



R. Cbaighead's Power press " Stereotyped by T. B. Smith, 

212 Fulton iStrset. 216 Williain Street. 



rV 

S 



TO 



CHARLES LAMB. E s a . 



THIS Y0LU3IE IS INSC IMBED, 



AS A MA.RK OF OLD FRIFN 



DSHIP AND LASTIiVG ESTKEM, 



By the author 



CONTENTS. 



TAOZ 

Advertisement to the present Edition . . . ix 

Preface ... xi 

Cymbehne ...... . . . . 1 

Macbeth 10 

Julius Cjesar ... 22 

Othello 28 

TiMON OF Athens 43 

coriolanus . 46 

Troilus and Cressida 57 

Antony and Cleopatra ...... 64 

Hamlet . . 70 

The Tempest , 77 

The Midsummer Night's Dream 85 

Romeo and Juliet 91 

Lear 103 

Richard II. 116 

Henry IV. In Two Parts ........ 123 

Henry V 132 

Henry VI. In Three Parts 140 

Richard III 148 

Henry Vni. . . 155 

King John 159 

Twelfth Night ; or. What You Will 164 

The Two Gentlemen of Verona ]71 

The Merchant of Venice . 174 

The Winter's Tale ISO 

All's Well that Ends Well 186 

Love's Labor 's Lost ... . . . 190 

Much Ado About Nothing 193 

As You Like It 198 

The Taming of the Shrew . 202 

Measure for Measure 207 

The Merry Wives of Windsor 212 

The Comedy of Errors 215 

Doubtful Plays of Shakspeare 218 

Poems and Sonnets 225 



ADVERTISEMENT 

TO THE THIRD L O N D O IV EDITIOX 

BY HAZLITT'S SON. 



The following work, of which the first edition was sold in 
a few days, has been long out of print ; the present repub- 
lication has been undertaken to 'supply the constant and 
increasing demand which the rising popularity of the au- 
thor has generated. 

Those to whom the masterly criticisms of William Haz- 
litt are most familiar — we especially allude to the notices 
of the English poets, the dramatists of Elizabeth's time, 
the comic writers, the actors of his own day, and the 
painters of every age — will gladly hail the appearance of 
the present volume, as a sign and promise of others yet to 
come ; as come they will, in the form of this, and contain- 
ing matter certainly not less entitled to preservation in an 
elegant and convenient shape, should the success of the 
present venture warrant similar experiments. 

Those also (a much larger class of the " reading pub- 
lic") to whom the waitings of our vigorous and original 
author are but partially known, through the medium of 
stray volumes, or an accidental and cursory glance at his 
fresh, startling and animated pages, will welcome with no 
less eagerness what, if encouraged, may prove the com- 
mencing volume of a rich and attractive series — an edi- 
tion of the miscellaneous and scattered writings of this 



ADVERTISEMENT. 



Patriot, Metaphysician, and Critic. This latter class of 
seekers is rapidly increasing, as copies of the old editions 
disappear and the name of their author comes brighter and 
brighter out of the "foul fog" in which contemporary jeal- 
ousy and political prejudice hoped effectually to hide its 
lustre. The minds on which, in spite of every disadvan- 
tage, he made a deep impression during his lifetime, were 
the minds of younger men than himself, and these are now 
reacting on others more youthful than themselves. Many 
who are promoting the best interests of the world, in 
wide or narrow circles, in the press or the lecture-room, 
the literary association or mechanics' institute, owe much 
of the immediate spring and impulse of the power which 
is now so happily producing power, to the force and 
life of Hazlitt's writings. No author in our language ex- 
ceeds him in the great art of setting his readers thinking. 
Where his own thoughts, whether from carelessness or 
caprice, fall short of the point of truth always aimed at, 
they nevertheless serve as guides and monitors to the un- 
derstanding and imagination of the reader. This seems 
especially the case with the work now submitted to the 
public. These views of the " Characters of Shakspeare's 
Plays" remind one of Kean's acting in some of the trage- 
dies here criticized. They are incomplete and faulty in 
some respects — speculative and doubtful in others ; but 
wonderfully full of thought, and always brilliant in ex- 
pression. Right or wrong, they cannot be read with in- 
difference ; for whatever may have been his faults, Hazlitt 
never wrote a dull sentence. 



PREFACE 



It is observed by Mr. Pope, that " If ever any author de- 
served the name of an original^ it w^as Shakspeare. Homer 
himself drev^^ not his art so immediately from the fountains 
of nature ; it proceeded through Egyptian strainers and 
channels, and came to him not without some tincture of 
the learning, or some cast of the models, of those before 
him. The poetry of Shakspeare was inspiration indeed: 
he is not so much an imitator, as an instrument of nature ; 
and it is not so just to say that he speaks from her, as that 
she speaks through him. 

" His characters are so much nature herself, that it is a 
sort of injury to call them by so distant a name as copies 
of her. Those of other poets have a constant resemblance, 
which shows that they have received them from one 
another, and were but multipliers of the same image : each 
picture, like a mock rainbow, is but the reflection of a 
reflection. But every single character in Shakspeare is as 
much an individual as those in life itself; it is as impossible 
to find any two alike, and such as, from their relation or 
affinity in any respect, appear most to be twins, will, upon 
comparison, be found remarkably distinct. To this hfe and 
variety of character, we must add the wonderful preserva- 
tion of it ; which is such throughout his plays, that, had 
all the speeches been printed without the very names of 



PREFACE. 



the persons, I believe one might have appHed them v^dth 
certainty to every speaker." 

The object of the volume here offered to the pubHc is to 
illustrate these remarks in a more particular manner by a 
reference to each play. A gentleman of the name of 
Mason, the author of a Treatise on Ornamental Gardening 
(not Mason the poet), began a work of a similar kind 
about forty years ago, but he only lived to finish a parallel 
between the characters of Macbeth and Richard III., 
which is an exceedingly ingenious piece of analytical criti- 
cism. Richardson's Essays include but a few of Shak- 
speare's principal characters. The only work which seemed 
to supersede the necessity of an attempt like the present 
was Schlegel's very admirable Lectures on the Drama, 
which gave by far the best account of the plays of Shak- 
speare that have hitherto appeared. The only circum- 
stances in which it was thought not impossible to improve 
on the manner in which the German critic has executed 
this part of his design were in avoiding an appearance of 
mysticism in his style, not very attractive to the English 
reader, and in bringing illustrations from particular pas- 
sages of the plays themselves, of which Schlegel's work, 
from the extensiveness of his plan, did not admit. We 
will at the same time confess, that some little jealousy of 
the character of the national understanding was not with- 
out its share in producing the following undertaking, for 
" we were piqued" that it should be reserved for a foreign 
critic to give " reasons for the faith which we English have 
in Shakspeare." Certainly, no writer among ourselves has 
shown either the same enthusiastic admiration of his genius, 
or the same philosophical acuteness in pointing out his 
characteristic excellences. As we have pretty well ex- 



PREFACE. xiii 



hausted all we had to say upon this subject in the body of 
the work, we shall here transcribe Schlegel's general ac- 
count of Shakspeare, which is in the following words : — 

" Never, perhaps, was there so comprehensive a talent 
for the delineation of character as Shakspeare's. It not 
only grasps the diversities of rank, sex and age, down to 
the dawnings of infancy ; not only do the king and the 
beggar, the hero and the pickpocket, the sage and the idiot, 
speak and act with equal truth ; not only does he transport 
himself to distant ages and foreign nations, and portray in 
the most accurate manner, with only a few apparent viola- 
tions of costume, the spirit of the ancient Romans, of the 
French in their wars with the English, of the English 
themselves during a great part of their history, of the 
Southern Europeans (in the serious parts of many come- 
dies), the cultivated society of that time, and the former 
rude and barbarous state of the North ; his human charac- 
ters have not only such depth and precision that they can- 
not be arranged under classes, and are inexhaustible, even 
in conception : — no — this Prometheus not merely forms 
men, he opens the gates of the magical world of spirits ; 
calls up the midnight ghost ; exhibits before us his watches 
amidst their unhallowed mysteries ; peoples the air with 
sportive fairies and sylphs : and these beings, existing only 
in imagination, possess such truth and consistency, that 
even when deformed monsters like Caliban, he extorts the 
conviction, that if there should be such beings, they would 
so conduct themselves. In a word, as he carries with him 
the most fruitful and daring fancy into the kingdom of 
nature, — on the other hand, he carries nature into the re- 
gions of fancy, lying beyond the confines of reality. We 
are lost in astonishment at seeing the extraordinary, the 



PREFACE. 



wonderful, and the unheard-of, in such intimate nearness. 
If Shakspeare deserves our admiration for his charac- 
ters, he is equally deserving of it for his exhibition of pas- 
sion, taking this word in its widest signification, as includ- 
ing every mental condition, every tone, from indifference or 
familiar mirth to the wildest rage and despair. He gives 
us the history of minds ; he lays open to us, in a single 
word, a whole series of preceding conditions. His pas- 
sions do not at first stand displayed to us in all their height, 
as is the case with so many tragic poets, who, in the lan- 
guage of Lessing, are thorough masters of the legal style 
of love. He paints in a most inimitable manner, the gradual 
progress from the firs* origin. * He gives,' as Lessing 
says, ' a living picture of all the most minute and secret 
artifices by which a feeling steals into our souls ; of all the 
imperceptible advantages which it there gains : of all the 
stratagems by which every other passion is made subser- 
vient to it, till it becomes the sole tyrant of our desires and 
aversions.' Of all poets, perhaps, he alone has portrayed 
the mental diseases — melancholy, delirium, lunacy — with 
such inexpressible, and, in every respect, definite truth, that 
the physician may enrich his observations from them in the 
same manner as from real cases. 

'• And yet Johnson has objected to Shakspeare, that his 
pathos is not always natural and free from affectation. 
There are, it is true, passages, though, comparatively 
speaking, very few, where his poetry exceeds the bounds 
of true dialogue, where a too soaring imagination, a too 
luxuriant wit, rendered the complete dramatic forgetfulness 
of himself impossible. With this exception, the censure 
originates only in a fanciless way of thinking, to which 
everything appears unnatural that does not suit its own 



PREFACE. 



tame insipidity. Hence, an idea has been formed of simple 
and natural pathos, which consists in exclamations destitute 
of imagery, and nowise elevated above every-day life. But 
energetic passions electrify the whole of the mental powers, 
and will, consequently, in highly favored natures, express 
themselves in an ingenious and figurative manner. It has 
been often remarked, that indignation gives wit ; and, as 
despair occasionally breaks out into laughter, it may some- 
times also give vent to itself in antithetical comparisons. 

" Besides, the rights of the poetical form have not been duly 
weighed. Shakspeare, who was always sure of his object, 
to move in a sufficiently powerful manner when he wished 
to do so, has occasionally, by indulging in a freer play, pur- 
posely moderated the impressions when too painful, and 
immediately introduced a musical alleviation of our sym- 
pathy. He has not those rude ideas of his art which many 
moderns seem to have, as if the poet, like the clown in the 
proverb, must strike twice on the same place. An ancient 
rhetorician delivered a caution against dwelling too long on 
the excitation of pity ; for nothing, he said, dries so soon as 
tears ; and Shakspeare acted conformably to this ingenious 
maxim, without knowing it. 

" The objection, that Shakspeare wounds our feelings by 
the open display of the most disgusting moral odiousness, 
harrows up the mind unmercifully, and tortures even our 
senses by the exhibition of the most insupportable and hate- 
ful spectacles, is one of much greater importance. He has 
never, in fact, varnished over wild and blood-thirsty pas- 
sions with a pleasing exterior, — never clothed crime and 
want of principle with a false show of greatness of soul ; 
and in that respect he is every way deserving of praise. 
Twice he has portrayed downright villains ; and the mas- 



PREFACE. 



terly way in which he has contrived to elude impressions 
of too painful a nature, may be seen in lago and Richard 
the Third. The constant reference to a petty and puny 
race must cripple the boldness of the poet. Fortunately 
for his art, Shakspeare lived in an age extremely suscepti- 
ble of noble and tender impressions, but which had still 
enough of the firmness inherited from a vigorous olden 
time, not to shrink back with dismay from every strong and 
violent picture. We have lived to see tragedies of which 
the catastrophe consists in the swoon of an enamored prin- 
cess. If Shakspeare falls occasionally into the opposite 
extreme, it is a noble error, originating in the fulness of a 
gigantic strength : and yet this tragical Titan, who storms 
the heavens, and threatens to tear the world from off its 
hinges ; who, more terrible than iEschylus, makes our hair 
stand on end, and congeals our blood with horror, pos- 
sessed, at the same time, the insinuating loveliness of the 
sweetest poetry. He plays with love like a child ; and his 
songs are breathed out like melting sighs. He unites in his 
genius the utmost elevation and the utmost depth ; and the 
most foreign, and even apparently irreconcilable properties 
subsist in him peaceably together. The world of spirits 
and nature have laid all their treasures at his feet. In 
strength a demi-god, in profundity of view a prophet, in 
all-seeing wisdom a protecting spirit of a higher order, he 
lowers himself to mortals, as if unconscious of his supe- 
riority ; and is as open and unassuming as a child. 

" Shakspeare's comic talent is equally wonderful with 
that which he has shown in the pathetic and tragic : it 
stands on an equal elevation, and possesses equal extent and 
profundity. All that I before wished was, not to admit that 
the former preponderated. He is highly inventive in comic 



PREFACE. xvii 



situations and motives. It will be hardly possible to show 
whence he has taken any of them ; whereas, in the serious 
part of his drama, he has generally laid hold of something 
already known. His comic characters are equally true, vari- 
ous, and profound, with his serious. So little is he disposed 
to caricature, that we may rather say many of his traits are 
almost too nice and delicate for the stage, that they can 
only be properly seized by a great actor and fully under- 
stood by a very acute audience. Not only has he delineat- 
ed many kinds of folly ; he has also contrived to exhibit 
mere stupidity in a most diverting and entertaining man- 
ner." Vol. ii., p. 145. 

We have the rather availed ourselves of this testimony 
of a foreign critic in behalf of Shakspeare, because our 
own countryman, Dr. Johnson, has not been so favorable 
to him. It may be said of Shakspeare, that " those who 
are not for him are against him :" for indifference is here 
the height of injustice. We may sometimes, in order " to 
do a great right, do a little wrong." An overstrained en- 
thusiasm is more pardonable with respect to Shakspeare 
than the want of it ; for our admiration cannot easily sur- 
pass his genius. We have a high respect for Dr. Johnson's 
character and understanding, mixed with something like 
personal attachment : but he was neither a poet nor a judge 
of poetry. He might in one sense be a judge of poetry 
as it falls within the limits and rules of prose, but not as it 
is poetry. Least of all was he qualified to be a judge of 
Shakspeare, who "alone is high fantastical." Let those 
who have a prejudice against Johnson read Boswell's Life 
of hitn : let those whom he has prejudiced against Shak- 
speare read Irene. We do not say that a man to be a critic 
must necessarily be a poet : but to be a good critic, he 

B 



PREFACE. 



ought not to be a bad poet. Such poetry as a man dehber- 
ately writes, such, and such only will he like. Dr. John- 
son's Preface to his edition of Shakspeare looks like a labo- 
rious attempt to bury the characteristic merits of his author 
under a load of cumbrous phraseology, and to weigh his 
excellences and defects in equal scales, stuffed full of 
•' swelling figures and sonorous epithets." Nor could it 
well be otherwise ; Dr. Johnson's general powers of rea- 
soning overlaid his critical susceptibility. All his ideas 
were cast in a given mould, in a set form : they were made 
out by rule and system, by climax, inference, and antithesis : 
Shakspeare's were the reverse. Johnson's understanding 
dealt only in round numbers : the fractions were lost upon 
him. He reduced everything to the common standard of 
conventional propriety ; and the most exquisite refinement 
or sublimity produced an effect on his mind, only as they 
could be translated into the language of measured prose. 
To him an excess of beauty was a fault ; for it appeared 
to him like an excrescence ; and his imagination was 
dazzled by the blaze of light. His writings neither shone 
with the beams of native genius, nor reflected them. The 
shifting shapes of fancy, the rainbow hues of things, made 
no impression on him : he seized only on the permanent and 
tangible. He had no idea of natural objects but " such as 
he could measure with a two-foot rule, or tell upon ten 
fingers :" he judged of human nature in the same way, by 
mood and figure : he saw only the definite, the positive, and 
the practical ; the average forms of things, not their strik- 
ing differences ; their classes, not their degrees. He was 
a man of strong common sense and practical wisdom, rather 
than of genius and feeling. He retained the regular, habi- 
tual impressions of actual objects, but he could not follow 



PREFACE. 



the rapid flights of fancy, or the strong movements of pas- 
sion. That is, he was to the poet what the painter of still 
life is to the painter of history. Common sense sympa- 
thizes with the impressions of things on ordinary minds in 
ordinary circumstances : genius catches the glancing com- 
binations presented to the eye of fancy, under the influence 
of passion. It is the province of the didactic reasoner to 
take cognizance of those results of human nature which 
are constantly repeated and always the same, which follow 
one another in regular succession, which are acted upon by 
large classes of men, and embodied in received customs, 
laws, language, and institutions ; and it was in arranging, 
comparing, and arguing on these kinds of general results, 
that Johnson's excellence lay. But he could not quit his 
hold of the common-place and mechanical, and apply the 
general rule to the particular exception, or show how the 
nature of man was modified by the workings of passion, or 
the infinite fluctuations of thought and accident. Hence he 
could judge neither of the heights nor depths of poetry. 
Nor is this all ; for being conscious of great powers in him- 
self, and those powers of an adverse tendency to those of 
his author, he would be for setting up a foreign jurisdiction 
over poetry, and making criticism a kind of Procrustes' 
bed of genius, where he might cut down imagination to 
matter of fact, regulate the passions according to rea- 
son, and translate the whole into logical diagrams and rhe- 
torical declamation. Thus he says of Shakspeare's cha- 
racters, in contradiction to what Pope had observed, and to 
what every one else feels, that each character is a species 
instead of being an individual. He in fact found the gen- 
eral species or didactic form in Shakspeare's characters, 
which was all he sought or cared for ; he did not find the 



PREFACE. 



individual traits, or the dramatic distinctions which Shak- 
speare has engrafted on this general nature, because he felt 
no interest in them. Shakspeare's bold and happy flights 
of imagination were equally thrown away upon our author. 
He was not only without any particular fineness of organic 
sensibility, alive to all the " mighty world of ear and eye," 
which is necessary to the painter or musician, but without 
that intenseness of passion which, seeking to exaggerate 
whatever excites the feehngs of pleasure or power in the 
mind, and moulding the impressions of natural objects ac- 
cording to the impulses of imagination, produces a genius 
and a taste for poetry. According to Dr. Johnson, a moun- 
tain is sublime, or a rose is beautiful ; for that their name 
and definition imply. But he would no more be able to 
give the description of Dover cliflf in Lear, or the descrip- 
tion of flowers in The Winter's Tale, than to describe the 
objects of a sixth sense ; nor do we think he would have 
any very profound feeling of the beauty of the passages 
here referred to. A stately common-place, such as Con- 
greve's description of a ruin in Tke Mourning Bride, would 
have answered Johnson's purpose just as well, or better 
than the first ; and an indiscriminate profusion of scents 
and hues would have interfered less with the ordinary rou- 
tine of his imagination than Perdita's lines, which seem 
enamored of their own sweetness — 

" Daffodils 



That come before the swallow dares, and take 
The winds of March with beauty ; violets dim. 
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes, 
Or Cytherea's breath." 

No one who does not feel the passion which these objects 
inspire can go along with the imagination which seeks to 



PREFACE. 



express that passion and the uneasy sense of deUght by 
something still more beautiful, and no one can feel this pas- 
sionate love of nature without quick natural sensibility. 
To a mere literal and formal apprehension, the inimitably 
characteristic epithet " violets ^m," must seem to imply a 
defect, rather than a beauty ; and to any one, not feeling 
the full force of that epithet, which suggests an image like 
" the sleepy eye of love," the allusion to " the lids of Juno's 
eyes " must appear extravagant and unmeaning. Shak- 
speare's fancy lent words and images to the most refined 
sensibiHty to nature, struggling for expression : his descrip- 
tions are identical with the things themselves, seen through 
the fine medium of passion : strip them of that connexion, 
and try them by ordinary conceptions and ordinary rules, 
and they are as grotesque and barbarous as you please. By 
thus lowering Shakspeare's genius to the standard of com- 
mon-place invention, it was easy to show that his faults 
were as great as his beauties ; for the excellence, which 
consists merely in a conformity to rules, is counterbalanced 
by the technical violation of them. Another circumstance 
which led to Dr. Johnson's indiscriminate praise or censure 
of Shakspeare, is the very structure of his style. Johnson 
wrote a kind of rhyming prose, in which he was compelled 
as much to finish the different clauses of his sentences, and 
to balance one period against another, as the writer of he- 
roic verse is to keep to lines of ten syllables with similar 
terminations. He no sooner acknowledges the merits of 
his author in one line than the periodical revolution of his 
style carries the weight of his opinion completely over to 
the side of objection, thus keeping up a perpetual alterna- 
tion of perfections and absurdities. We do not otherwise 
know how to account for such assertions as the following : 



PREFACE. 



" In his tragic scenes, there is always something wanting, 
but his comedy often sm'passes expectation or desire. His 
comedy pleases by the thoughts and the language, and his 
tragedy, for the greater part, by incident and action. His 
tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct." Yet 
after saying that " his tragedy was skill," he affirms in the 
next page, " His declamations or set speeches are com- 
monly cold and weak, for his power was the power of na- 
ture : when he endeavored, like other tragic writers, to 
catch opportunities of amplification, and instead of inquir- 
ing what the occasion demanded, to show how much his 
stores of knowledge could supply, he seldom escapes with- 
out the pity or resentment of his reader." Poor Shak- 
speare ! Between the charges here brought against him. 
of w ant of nature in the first instance, and of want of skill 
in the second, he could hardly escape being condemned. 
And again, " But the admirers of this great poet have most 
reason to complain when he approaches nearest to his high- 
est excellence, and seems fully resolved to sink them in de- 
jection, or mollify them with tender emotions by the fall of 
greatness, the danger of innocence, or the crosses of love. 
What he does best, he soon ceases to do. He no sooner 
begins to move than he counteracts himself; and terror and 
pity, as they are rising in the mind, are checked and blasted 
by sudden frigidity." In all this, our critic seems more 
bent on maintaining the equilibrium of his style than the 
consistency or truth of his opinions. If Dr. Johnson's opi- 
nion was right, the following observations on Shakspeare's 
Plays must be greatly exaggerated, if not ridiculous. If 
he was wrong, what has been said may perhaps account 
for his being so, without detracting from his ability and 
judgment in other things. 
April 5, 1818. 



CYMBELINE. 



CTMBELINE. 



Cymbeline is one of the most delightful of Shakspeare's histori- 
cal plays. It may be considered as a dramatic romance, in 
which the most striking parts of the story are thrown into the 
form of a dialogue, and the intermediate circumstances are ex- 
plained by the different speakers, as occasion renders it neces- 
sary. The action is less concentrated in consequence ; but the 
interest becomes more aerial and refined from the principle of 
perspective introduced into the subject by the imaginary changes 
of scene as well as by the length of time it occupies. The read- 
ing of this play is like going a journey with some uncertain ob- 
ject at the end of it, and in which the suspense is kept up and 
heightened by the long intervals between each action. Though 
the events are scattered over such an extent of surface, and relate 
to such a variety of characters, yet the links which bind the dif- 
ferent interests of the story together are never entirely broken. 
The most straggling and seemingly casual incidents are contriv- 
ed in such a manner as to lead at last to the most complete de- 
velopment of the catastrophe. The ease and conscious uncon- 
cern with which this is effected only makes the skill more w^onder- 
ful. The business of the plot evidently thickens in the last act : 
the story moves forward with increasing rapidity at every step ; 
its various ramifications are drawn from the most distant points to 
the same centre ; the principal characters are brought together, 
and placed in very critical situations ; and the fate of almost 
every person in the drama is made to depend on the solution of a 
single circumstance — the answer of lachimo to the question of 
Imogen respecting the obtaining of the ring from Posthumus. 
Dr. Johnson is of opinion that Shakspeare was generally inatten- 
2 



CYMBELINE. 



tive to the winding up of his plots. We think the contrary is 
true ; and we might cite in proof of this remark not only the 
present play, but the conclusion of Lear, of Romeo and Juliet, 
ofMacleth, of Othello, even of Hamlet, and of other plays of less 
moment, in which the last act is crowded with decisive events 
brought about by natural and striking means. 

The pathos in Cymbeline is not violent or tragical, but of the 
most pleasing and amiable kind. A certain tender gloom over- 
spreads the whole. Posthumus is the ostensible hero of the piece, 
but its greatest charm is the character of Imogen. Posthumus 
is only interesting from the interest she takes in him, and she is 
only interesting herself from her tenderness and constancy to her 
husband. It is the peculiar characteristic of Shakspeare's hero- 
ines, that they seem to exist only in their attachment to others. 
They are pure abstractions of the affections. We think as little 
of their persons as they do themselves, because we are let into 
the secrets of their hearts, which are more important. We are 
too much interested in their affairs to stop to look at their faces, 
except by stealth and at intervals. No one ever hit the true 
perfection of the female character, the sense of weakness leaning 
on the strength of its affections for support, so well as Shakspeare 
— no one ever so well painted natural tenderness free from affecta- 
tion and disguise — no one else ever so well showed how delicacy 
and timidity, when driven to extremity, grow romantic and ex- 
travagant; for the romance of his heroines (in which they 
abound) is only an excess of the habitual prejudices of their sex, 
scrupulous of being false to their vows, truant to the affections, 
and taught by the force of feeling when to forego the forms of 
propriety for the essence of it. His women are in this' respect 
exquisite logicians ; for there is nothing so logical as passion. 
They know their own minds exactly ; and only follow up a fa- 
vorite idea which they have sworn to with their tongues, and 
which is engraven on their hearts, into its untoward consequen- 
ces. They are the prettiest little set of martyrs and confessors 
on record. — Gibber, in speaking of the early English stage, ac- 
counts for the want of prominence and theatrical display in 
Shakspeare's female characters from the circumstance, that wo- 
men in those days were not allowed to play the parts of women, 



CYMBELINE. 



which made it necessary to keep these a good deal in the back- 
ground. Does not this state of manners itself, which prevented 
their exhibiting themselves in public, and confined them to the 
relations and charities of domestic life, afford a truer explanation 
of the matter ? His women are certainly very unlike stage- 
heroines ; the reverse of tragedy-queens. . ^ .; 

We have almost as great an affection for Imogen as she had 
for Posthumus ; and she deserves it better. Of all Shakspeare's 
women she is perhaps the most tender and the most artless. Her 
incredulity in the opening scene with lachimo, as to her husband's 
infidelity, is much the same as Desdemona's backwardness to 
believe Othello's jealousy. Her answer to the most distressing 
part of the picture is only, " My lord, I fear, has forgot Britain." 
Her readiness to pardon lachimo's false imputations and his de- 
signs against herself, is a good lesson to prudes ; and may show 
that where there is a real attachment to virtue, it has no need to 
bolster itself up with an outrageous or affected antipathy to vice. 
The scene in which Pisanio gives Imogen his master's letter, ac- 
cusing her of incontinency on the treacherous suggestions of 
lachimo, is as touching as it is possible for anything to be t-^~ 

jpu^iiO ««•!■ • 

" Pisanio. What cheer, Madam ? 

Imogen. False to his bed ! What is it to be false ? 
To lie in watch there, and to think on him ? 
To weep 'twixt clock and clock ? If sleep charge nature, 
To break it with a fearful dream of him, 
And cry myself awake } That's false to 's bed, is it ? 

Pisanio. Alas, good lady ! 

Imogen. I false ? thy conscience witness, laohimo. 
Thou didst accuse him of incontinency. 
Thou then look'dst like a villain : now methinks, 
Thy favor's good enough. Some jay of Italy, . 
Whose mother was her painting, hath betrayed him : 
Poor I am stale, a garment out of fashion, 
And for I am richer than to hang by th' walls, 
I must be ript ; to pieces with me. Oh, 
Men's vows are women's traitors. All good seeming 
By thy revolt, oh husband, shall be thought 
Put on for villainy : not born where 't grows, 
But worn a bait for ladies. 

Pisanio. Good Madam, hear me — 

Imogen. Talk thy tongue weary, speak : 



CYMBELINE. 



I have heard I am a strumpet, and mine ear, 
Therein false struck, can take no greater wound. 
Nor tent to bottom that." 

When Pisanio, who had been charged to kill his mistress, puts 
her in a way to live, she says, 

" Why, good fellow. 
What shall I do the while ? Where bide ? How live ? 
Or in my life what comfort, when I am 
Dead to my husband ?" 

Yet when he advises her to disguise herself in boy's clothes, 
and suggests " a course pretty and full in view," by which she 
may " happily be near the residence of Posthumus," she ex- 
claims, 

"Oh, for such means, 
Though peril to my modesty, not death on't, 
I would adventure." 

And when Pisanio, enlarging on the consequences, tells her 
she must change 



" Fear and niceness. 



The handmaids of all women, or more truly, 
Woman its pretty self, into a waggish courage, 
Ready in gibes, quick answer'd, saucy, and 
As quarrellous as the weazel" - 

she interrupts him hastily ; 

"Nay, be brief; 

I see into thy end, and am almost 

A man already." 

In her journey thus disguised to Milford-Haven, she loses her 
guide and her way ; and unbosoming her complaints, says 
beautifully, — 



' My dear Lord, 



Thou art one of the false ones ; now I think on thee, 
My hunger's gone ; but even before, I was 
At point to sink for food." 



CYMBELINE. 



She afterwards finds, as she thinks, the dead body of Posthu- 
mus, and engages herself as a footboy to serve a Roman officer, 
when she has done all due obsequies to him whom she calls her 
former master — 

" And when 

With wild wood-leaves and weeds, I ha' strew'd his grave, 

And on it said a century of pray'rs. 

Such as I can, twice o'er I'll weep and sigh, 

And leaving so his service, follow you. 

So please you entertain me." 

Now this is the very religion of love. She all along relies 
little on her personal charms, which she fears may have been 
eclipsed by some painted jay of Italy ; she relies on her merit, 
and her merit is in the depth of her love, her truth and constancy. 
Our admiration of her beauty is excited with as little conscious- 
ness as possible on her part. There are two delicious descrip- 
tions given of her, one when she is asleep, and one when she is 
supposed dead. Arviragus thus addresses her — 

" With fairest flowers. 



While summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele, 
I'll sweeten thy sad grave ; thou shalt not lack 
The flow'r that's like thy face, pale primrose, nor 
The azur'd hare-bell, like thy veins, no, nor 
The leaf of eglantine, which, not to slander, 
Out-sweeten'd not thy breath.'* 

The yellow lachimo gives another, thus, when he steals into 
her bed-chamber : — 

" Cytherea, 

How bravely thou becom'st thy bed ! Fresh lily, 
And whiter than the sheets ! That I might touch — 
But kiss, one kiss— 'Tis her breathing that 
Perfumes the chamber thus : the flame o' th' taper 
Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids 
To see th' enclosed lights now canopied 
Under the windows, white and azure, laced 
With blue of Heav'n's own tint — on her left breast 
A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops 
I' the bottom of a cowslip." 



CYMBELINE. 



There is a moral sense in the proud beauty of this last image, 
a rich surfeit of the fancy, — as that well-known passage begin- 
ning, " Me of my lawful pleasure she restrained, and prayed me 
oft forbearance," sets a keener edge upon it by the inimitable 
picture of modesty and self-denial. 

The character of Cloten, the conceited, booby lord, and rejected 
lover of Imogen, though not very agreeable in itself, and at pre- 
sent obsolete, is drawn with great humor and knowledge of cha- 
racter. The description which Imogen gives of his unwelcome 
addresses to her — " Whose love-suit hath been to me as fearful 
as a siege" — is enough to cure the most ridiculous lover of his 
folly. It is remarkable, that though Cloten makes so poor a 
figure in love, he is described as assuming an air of consequence 
as the Queen's son in a council of state, and with all the absurdity 
of his person and manners, is not without shrewdness in his 
observations. So true is it that folly is as often owing to a want 
of proper sentiments as to a want of understanding ! The ex- 
clamation of the ancient critic. Oh Menander and Nature, which 
of you copied from the other! would not be misapplied to 
Shakspeare. 

The other characters in this play are represented with great 
truth and accuracy, and as it happens in most of the author's 
works, there is not only the utmost keeping in each separate 
character ; but in the casting of the different parts, and their 
relation to one another, there is an affinity and harmony, like 
what we may observe in the gradations of color in a picture. 
The striking and powerful contrasts in which Shakspeare 
abounds could not escape observation ; but the use he makes of 
the principle of analogy to reconcile the greatest diversities of 
character, and to maintain a continuity of feeling throughout, 
has not been sufficiently attended to. In Cymbeline, for instance, 
the principal interest arises out of the unalterable fidelity of 
Imogen to her husband under the most trying circumstances. 
Now the other parts of the picture are filled up with subordinate 
examples of the same feeling, variously modified by different 
situations, and applied to the purposes of virtue or vice. The 
plot is aided by the amorous importunities of Cloten, by the 
tragical determination of lachimo to conceal the defeat of his 



CYMBELINE. 



project by a daring imposture : the faithful attachment of Pisanio 
to his mistress is an affecting accompaniment to the whole ; the 
obstinate adherence to his purpose in Bellarius, who keeps the 
fate of the young princes so long a secret, in resentment for the 
ungrateful return to his former services ; the incorrigible wick- 
edness of the Queen, and even the blind uxorious confidence of 
Cymbeline, are all so many lines of the same story, tending to 
the same point. The effect of this coincidence is rather felt 
than observed ; and as the impression exists unconsciously in 
the mind of the reader, so it probably arose in the same manner 
in the mind of the author, not from design, but from the force of 
natural association, a particular train of feeling suggesting dif- 
ferent inflections of the same predominant principle, melting into, 
and strengthening one another, like chords in music. 

The characters of Bellarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus, and 
the romantic scenes in which they appear, are a fine relief to 
the intrijTues and artificial refinements of the court from which 

o 

they are banished. Nothing can surpass the wildness and sim- 
plicity of the descriptions of the mountain-life they lead. They 
follow the business of huntsmen, not of shepherds ; and this is in 
keeping with the spirit of adventure and uncertainty in the rest 
of the story, and with the scenes in which they are afterwards 
called on to act. How admirably the youthful fire and impa- 
tience to emerge from their obscurity in the young princes is 
opposed to the cooler calculations and prudent resignation of 
their more experienced counsellor ! How well the disadvan- 
tages of knowledge and of ignorance, of solitude and society, 
are placed against each other ! 

" Guiderius. Out of your proof you speak : we poor unfledg*d 
Have never wing'd from view o' th' nest ; nor know not 
What air's from home. Haply this life is best, 
If quiet life is best ; sweeter to you 
That have a sharper known ; well corresponding 
With your stiff age ; but unto us it is 
A cell of ignorance ; travelling a-bed, 
A prison for a debtor, that not dares 
To stride a limit, 

Arviragus. What should we speak of 
When we are old as you ? When we shall hear 



CYMBELINE. 



The rain and wind beat dark December ? How, 
In this our pinching cave, shall we discourse 
The freezing hours away ? We have seen nothing. 
We are beastly ; subtle as the fox for prey, 
Like warlike as the wolf for what we eat : 
Our valor is to chase what flies ; our cage 
We make a quire, as doth the prison'd bird, 
And sing our bondage freely." 

The answer of Bellarius to this expostulation is hardly satis- 
factory ; for nothing can be an answer to hope, or the passion of 
the mind for unknown good, but experience. — The forest of 
Arden, in As you like it, can alone compare with the mountain 
scenes in Cymbeline : yet how different the contemplative quiet 
of the one from the enterprising boldness and precarious mode 
of subsistence in the other ! Shakspeare not only lets us into 
the minds of his characters, but gives a tone and color to the 
scenes he describes from the feelings of their imaginary inhabit- 
ants. He at the same time preserves the utmost propriety of 
action and passion, and gives all their local accompaniments. 
If he was equal to the greatest things, he was not above an 
attention to the smallest. Thus the gallant sportsmen in Cym- 
beline have to encounter the abrupt declivities of hill and 
valley : Touchstone and Audrey jog along a level path. The 
deer in Cymbeline are only regarded as objects of prey, " The 
game's a-foot," &c., — with Jaques they are fine subjects to 
moralize upon at leisure, " under the shade of melancholy 
boughs." 

We cannot take leave of this play, which is a favorite with us, 
without noticing some occasional touches of natural piety and 
morality. We may allude here to the opening of the scene in 
which Bellarius instructs the young princes to pay their orisons 
to heaven: — 



See boys ! this gate 



Instructs you how f adore the Heav'ns ; and bows you 
To morning's holy office. 

GuiDERius. Hail, Heaven ! 

Arviragus. Hail, Heaven ! 

Bellarius. Now for our mountain-sport, up to yon hill. 



CYMBELINE. 



What a grace and unaffected spirit of piety breathes in this 
passage ! In like manner, one of the brothers says to the other, 
when about to perform the funeral rites to Fidele, 

" Nay, Cadwall, we must lay his head to the east; 
My father hath a reason for't." 

Shakspeare's morality is introduced in the same simple, unob- 
trusive manner. Imogen will not let her companions stay away 
from the chase to attend her when sick, and gives her reason 
for it — 

" Stick to your journal course ; the breach of custom 
Is breach of all!" 

When the Queen attempts to disguise her motives for pro- 
curing the poison from Cornelius, by saying she means to try its 
effect on " creatures not worth the hanging," his answer con- 
veys at once a tacit reproof of her hypocrisy and a useful lesson 
of humanity — • 



" Your Highness 



I 



Shall from this practice but make hard your heart. 



10 MACBETH. 



MACBETH. 



Macbeth and Lear, Othello and Hamlet, are usually reckoned 
Shakspeare's four principal tragedies. Lear stands first for the 
profound intensity of the passion ; Macbeth for the wildness of 
the imagination and the rapidity of the action ; Othello for the 
progressive interest and powerful alternations of feeling ; Hamlet 
for the refined development of thought and sentiment. If the 
force of genius shown in each of these works is astonishing, their 
variety is not less so. They are like different creations of the 
same mind, not one of which has the slightest reference to the 
rest. This distinctness and originality is indeed the necessary 
consequence of truth and nature. Shakspeare's genius alone 
appeared to possess the resources of nature. He is "your only 
tragedy-maker.'^ His plays have the force of things upon the 
mind. What he represents is brought home to the bosom as a 
part of our experience, implanted in the memory as if we had 
known the places, persons, and things of which he treats. Mac- 
beth is like a record of a preternatural and tragical event. It 
has the rugged severity of an old chronicle, with all that the ima- 
gination of the poet can engraft upon traditional belief. The 
castle of Macbeth, round which " the air smells wooingly " 
and where " the temple-haunting martlet builds," has a real 
subsistence in the mind ; the Weird Sisters meet us in person on 
"the blasted heath;" the "air-drawn dagger" moves slowly 
before our eyes ; the " gracious Duncan," the " blood-boltered 
Banquo " stand before us ; all that passed through the mind of 
Macbeth passes, without the loss of a tittle, through our's. All 
that could actually take place, and all that is only possible to be 
conceived,, what was said and what was done, the workings of 
passion, the spells of magic, are brought before us with the same 



MACBETH. 11 

absolute truth and vividness. Shakspeare excelled in the open- 
ings of his plays ; that of Macbeth is the most striking of any. 
The wildness of the scenery, the sudden shifting of the situa- 
tions and characters, the bustle, the expectations excited, are 
equally extraordinary. From the first entrance of the Witches 
and the description of them when they meet Macbeth, 



What are these 



So wither'd and so wild in their attire, 
That look not like the inhabitants of th' earth 
And yet are on't ?" 

the mind is prepared for all that follows. 

This tragedy is alike distinguished for the lofty imagination 
it displays, and for the tumultuous vehemence of the action ; and 
the one is made the moving principle of the other. The over- 
whelming pressure of preternatural agency urges on the tide of 
human passion with redoubled force. Macbeth himself appears 
driven along by the violence of his fate like a vessel drifting 
before a storm ; he reels to and fro like a drunken man ; he 
staggers under the weight of his own purposes and the sugges- 
tions of others ; he stands at bay with his own situation '„ and 
from the superstitious awe and breathless suspense into which 
the communications of the Weird Sisters throw him, is hurried 
on with daring impatience to verify their predictions, and with 
impious and bloody hand to tear aside the veil which hides the 
uncertainty of the future. He is not equal to the struggle with 
fate and conscience. He now " bends up each corporal in- 
strument to the terrible feat ;" at other times his heart misgives 
him, and he is cowed and abashed by his success. " The deed, 
no less than the attempt, confounds him." His mind is assailed 
by the stings of remorse, and full of " preternatural solicitings." 
His speeches and soliloquies are dark riddles on human life, 
baffling solution, and entangling him in their labyrinths. In 
thought he is absent and perplexed, sudden and desperate in act, 
from a distrust of his own resolution. His energy springs from 
the anxiety and agitation of his mind. His blindly rushing for- 
ward on the objects of his ambition and revenge, or his recoiling 
from them, equally betrays the harassed state of his feelings. 



12 MACBETH. 



This part of his character is admirably set off by being brought 
in connection with that of Lady Macbeth, whose obdurate 
strength of will and masculine firmness give her the ascendency 
over her husband's faltering virtue. She at once seizes on the 
opportunity that offers for the accomplishment of their wished- 
for greatness, and never flinches from her object till all is over. 
The magnitude of her resolution almost covers the magnitude of 
her guilt. She is a great bad woman, whom we hate, but whom 
we fear more than we hate. She does not excite our loathing 
and abhorrence like Regan and Goneril. She is only wicked to 
gain a great end ; and is perhaps more distinguished by her 
commanding presence of mind and inexorable self-will, which 
do not suffer her to be diverted from a bad purpose, when once 
formed, by weak and womanly regrets, than by the hardness of 
her heart or want of natural affections. The impression which 
her lofty determination of character makes on the mind of Mac- 
beth is well described where he exclaims, 

" Bring forth men children only ; 

For thy undaunted mettle should compose 
Nothing but males !" 

Nor do the pains she is at to " screw his courage to the sticking- 
place," the reproach to him, not to be " lost so poorly in himself," 
the assurance that " a little water clears them of this deed," 
show anything but her greater consistency in wickedness. Her 
strong-nerved ambition furnishes ribs of steel to " the sides of his 
intent ;" and she is herself wound up to the execution of her 
baneful project with the same unshrinking fortitude in crime, 
that in othei circumstances she would probably have shown pa- 
tience in suffering. The deliberate sacrifice of all other con- 
siderations to the gaining " for their future days and nights sole 
sovereign sway and masterdom," by the murder of Duncan, is 
gorgeously expressed in her invocation on hearing of " his fatal 
entrance under her battlements :" — 

" Come all you spirits 

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here : 
And fill me, from the crown to th' toe, top-full 
Of direst cruelty ; make thick my blood. 



MACBETH. 13 



Stop up the access and passage to remorse, 

That no compunctious visitings of nature 

Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between 

The efiect and it. Come to my woman's breasts. 

And take my milk for gall, you murthering ministers, 

Wherever in your sightless substances 

You wait on nature's mischief. Come, thick night I 

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, 

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, 

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dzurk, 

To cry, hold, hold !"— 

When she first hears that " Duncan comes there to sleep" she is 
so overcome by the news, which is beyond her utmost expectations, 
that she answers the messenger, " Thou'rt mad to say it :" and 
on receiving her husband's account of the predictions of the 
Witches, conscious of his instability of purpose, and that her 
presence is necessary to goad him on to the consummation of his 
promised greatness, she exclaims — 

" Hie thee hither, 

That I may pour my spirits in thine ear, 
And chastise with the valor of my tongue 
All that impedes thee from the golden round, 
Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem 
To have thee crowned withal." 

This swelling exultation and keen spirit of triumph, this unHp' 
trollable eagerness of anticipation, which seems to dilate her 
form and take possession of all her faculties, this solid, substan- 
tial flesh and blood display of passion, exhibit a striking contrast 
to the cold, abstracted, gratuitous, servile malignity of the 
Witches, who are equally instrumental in urging Macbeth to his 
fate for the mere love of mischief, and from a disinterested delight 
in deformity and cruelty. They are hags of mischief, obscene 
panders to iniquity, malicious from their impotence of enjoy- 
ment, enamored of destruction, because they are themselves 
unreal, abortive, half-existences, and become sublime from their 
exemption from all human sympathies and contempt for all 
human affairs, as Lady Macbeth does by the force of passion I 
Her fault seems to have been an excess of that strong principle 
of self-interest and family aggrandizement, not amenable to the 



14 MACBETH. 



common feelings of compassion and j ustice, which is so marked 
a feature in barbarous nations and times. A passing reflection 
of this kind, on the resemblance of the sleeping king to her 
father, alone prevents her from slaying Duncan with her own 
hand. 

In speaking of the character of Lady Macbeth, we ought not 
to pass over Mrs. Siddons's manner of acting that part. We can 
conceive of nothing grander. It was something above nature. 
It seemed almost as if a being of a superior order had dropped 
from a higher sphere to awe the world with the majesty of her 
appearance. Power was seated on her brow, passion emanated 
from her breast as from a shrine ; she was tragedy personified. 
In coming on in the sleeping scene, her eyes were open, but their 
sense was shut. She was like a person bewildered and uncon- 
scious of what she did. Her lips moved involuntarily — all her 
gestures were involuntary and mechanical. She glided on and 
off the stage like an apparition. To have seen her in that cha- 
racter was an event in every one's life, not to be forgotten. 

The dramatic beauty of the character of Duncan, which ex- 
cites the respect and pity even of his murderers, has been often 
pointed out. It forms a picture of itself. An instance of the 
author's power of giving a striking effect to a common reflection, 
by the manner of introducing it, occurs in a speech of Duncan, 
^|omplaining of liis having been deceived in his opinion of the 
^^hane of Cawdor, at the very moment that he is expressing the 
most unbounded confidence in the loyalty and service of Mac- 
beth. 

" There is no art 
To find the mind's construction in the face : 
He was a gentleman, on whom I built 
An absolute trust. 

worthiest cousin, {addressing himself to Macbeth.) 

The sin of my ingratitude e'en now 
Was great upon me," &c. 

Another passage to show that Shakspeare lost sight of nothing 
that could in any way give relief or heightening to his subject, 
is the conversation which takes place between Banquo and 
Fleance immediately before the murder of Duncan. 



MACBETH. 15 



" Ban QUO. How goes the night, boy ? 

Fleance. The moon is down : I have not heard the clock. 

Banquo. And she goes down at twelve. 

Fleance. I take 't, 'tis later, Sir. 

Banquo. Hold, take my sword. There's husbandry in heav'n. 
Their candles are all out. — 
A heavy summons lies like lead upon me, 
And yet I would not sleep ; Merciful Powers, 
Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature 
Gives way to in repose." 

In like manner, a fine idea is given of the gloomy coming on 
of evening, just as Banquo is going to be assassinated. 

" Light thickens and the crow 
Makes wing to the rooky wood." 

* * * * * * " 

" Now spurs the 'lated traveller apace 
To gain the timely inn." 

Macbeth (generally speaking) is done upon a stronger and 
more systematic principle of contrast than any other of Shak- 
speare's plays. It moves upon the verge of an abyss, and is a 
constant struggle between life and death. The action is despe- 
rate, .and the reaction is dreadful. It is a huddling together 
of fierce extremes, a war of opposite natures which of them 
shall destroy the other. There is nothing but what has a violjfcl 
end or a violent beginning. The lights and shades are laid^^y 
with a determined hand ; the transitions from triumph to despair, 
from the height of terror to the repose of death, are sudden and 
startling ; every passion brings in its fellow-contrary, and the 
thoughts pitch and jostle against each other as in the dark. The 
whole play is an unruly chaos of strange and forbidden things, 
where the ground rocks under our feet. Shakspeare's genius 
here took its full swing, and trod upon the farthest bounds of 
nature and passion. This circumstance will account for the 
abruptness and violent antitheses of the style, the throes and 
labor which run through the expression, and from defects will 
turn them into beauties. " So fair and foul a day I have not 
seen," &;c. " Such welcome and unwelcome news together.'* 
" Men's lives are like the flowers in their caps, dying or ere 



18 MACBETH. 



they sicken." " Look like the innocent flower, but be the ser- 
pent under it." The scene before the castle-gate follows the 
appearance of the Witches on the heath, and is followed by a 
midnight murder. Duncan is cut off betimes by treason leagued 
with witchcraft, and Macduff is ripped untimely from his 
mother's womb to avenge his death. Macbeth, after the death 
of Banquo, wishes for his presence in extravagant terms. " To 
him and all we thirst," and when his ghost appears, cries out, 
" Avaunt and quit my sight," and being gone, he is " himself 
again." Macbeth resolves to get rid of Macduff, that "he may 
sleep in spite of thunder ;" and cheers his wife on the doubtful 
intelligence of Banquo's taking oS with the encouragement — 
" Then be thou jocund : ere the bat has flown his cloistered 
flight ; ere to black Hecate's summons the shard-born beetle has 
rung night's yawning peal, there shall be done — a deed of dread- 
ful note." In Lady Macbeth's speech, " Had he not resembled 
my father as he slept, I had done 't," there is murder and filial 
piety together ; and in urging him to fulfil his vengeance against 
the defenceless king, her thoughts spare the blood neither of 
infants nor old age. The description of the Witches is full of 
the same contradictory principle ; they " rejoice when good 
kings bleed," "they are neither of the earth nor the air, but 
both ; they should be women, but their beards forbid it ;" they 
^ake all the pains possible to lead Macbeth on to the height of 
nis ambition, only to betray him in deeper consequence, and 
after showing him all the pomp of their art, discover their ma. 
lignant delight in his disappointed hopes, by that bitter taunt, 
" Why stands Macbeth thus amazedly ?" We might multiply 
such instances everywhere. 

The leading features in the character of Macbeth are striking 
enough, and they form what may bethought at first only a bold, 
rude, Gothic outline. By comparing it with other characters 
of the same author we shall perceive the absolute truth and 
identity which is observed in the midst of the gidd^ whirl and 
rapid career of events. Macbeth in Shakspeare no more loses 
his identity of character in the fluctuations of fortune or the 
storm of passion, than Macbeth in himself would have lost the 
identity of his person. The genius of Shakspeare was as much 



MACBETH. Vf 



shown in the subtlety and nice discrimination, as in the force 
and variety of his characters. This distinction is not preserved 
more completely in those which are the most opposite, than in 
those which in their general features and obvious appearance 
most nearly resemble each other. It has been observed, with 
very little exaggeration, that not one of his speeches could be 
put into the mouth of any other character than the one to which 
it is given, and that the transposition, if attempted, might be 
always detected from some other circumstance in the passage 
itself. If to invent according to nature be the true definition of 
genius, Shakspeare had more of this quality than any other 
writer. He might be said to have been a joint worker with na- 
ture, and to have created an imaginary world of his own, which 
has all the appearance and the truth of reality. His mind, 
while it exerted an absolute control over the stronger workings 
of the passions, was exquisitely alive to the slightest impulses 
and most evanescent shades of character and feeling. The 
broad distinctions and governing principles of human nature 
are presented, not in the abstract, but in their immediate and 
endless applications to different persons and things. The local 
details, the particular accidents, have the fidelity of history 
without losing anything of their general effect. 

It is the business of poetry, and indeed of all works of 
imagination, to exhibit the species through the individual. 
Otherwise, there can be no opportunity for the exercise of the 
imagination, without which the descriptions of the painter or 
the poet are lifeless, unsubstantial, and vapid. If some modern 
critics are right with their sweeping generalities and vague ab- 
stractions, Shakspeare was quite wrong. In the French dra- 
matists only the class is represented, never the individual : their 
kings, their heroes, and their lovers are all the same, and they 
are all French, that is, they are nothing but the mouth-pieces 
of certain rhetorical, commonplace sentiments on the favorite 
topics of morality and the passions. The characters in Shaks- 
peare do not declaim like pedantic school-boys, but speak and 
act like men, placed in real circumstances, with real hearts of 
flesh and blood beating in their bosoms. No two of his charac- 
ters are the same, more than they would be so in nature. Those 
3 



18 MACBETH. 



that are the most alike are distinguished by positive differences, 
which accompany and modify the leading principle of the cha- 
racter through its most obscure ramifications, embodying the 
habits, gestures, and almost the looks of the individual. These 
touches of nature are often so many, and so m.inute, that the 
poet cannot be supposed to have been distinctly aware of the 
operation of the springs by which his imagination was set at 
work : yet every one of the results is brought out with a truth 
and clearness, as if his whole study had been directed to that 
peculiar trait of character or subordinate train of feeling. 

Thus Macbeth and Richard III., King Henry VI, and 
Richard II. — characters that, in their general description, and 
in common hands, and indeed in the hands of any other poet, 
would be merely repetitions of the same general idea, more or 
less exaggerated — are distinguished by traits as precise, though 
of course less violent, than those which separate Macbeth from 
Henry VI., or Richard III, from Richard II. Shakspeare 
has with wonderful accuracy, and without the smallest appear- 
ance of effort, varied the portraits of imbecility and effeminacy 
in the two deposed monarchs. With still more powerful and 
masterly strokes he has marked the different effects of ambition 
and cruelty, operating on different dispositions and in different 
circumstances, in his Macbeth and Richard III. Both are ty- 
rants, usurpers, murderers, both violent and ambitious, both 
courageous, cruel, treacherous. But Richard is cruel from nature 
and constitution. Macbeth becomes so from accidental circum- 
stances. Richard is from his birth deformed in body and mind, 
and naturally incapable of good. Macbeth is full of " the 
milk of human kindness," is frank, sociable, generous. He 
is urged to the commission of guilt by golden opportunity, by 
the instigations of his wife, and by prophetic warnings. " Fate 
and metaphysical aid " conspire against his virtue and his loy- 
alty. Richard on the contrary needs no prompter, but wades 
through a series of crimes to the height of his ambition, from 
the ungovernable violence of his passions and a restless love of 
mischief. Fie is never gay but in the prospect, or in the suc- 
cess of his villanies ; Macbeth is full of horror at the thoughts 
of the murder of Duncan, which he is with difficulty prevailed 



MACBETH. l« 



on to commit, and of remorse after its perpetration. Richard 
has no mixture of common humanity in his composition, no re- 
gard to kindred or posterity, he owns no fellowship with others, 
but is " himself alone." Macbeth is not without feelings of sym- 
pathy, is accessible to pity, is even in some measure the dupe 
of his uxoriousness, ranks the loss of friends, of the love of his 
followers, and of his good name, among the causes which have 
made him weary of life, and regrets that he has ever seized the 
crown by unjust means, since he cannot transmit it to his pos- 
terity — 

" For Banquo's issue have I 'fil'd my mind — 
For them the gracious Duncan have I murther'd. 
To make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings." 

In the agitation of his thoughts, he envies those whom he has 
sent to peace. " Duncan is in his grave ; after life's fitful 
fever he sleeps well." It is true, he becomes more callous as 
he plunges deeper in guilt, " direness is thus made familiar to 
his slaughterous thoughts," and he in the end anticipates his wife 
in the boldness and bloodiness of his enterprises, while she, for 
want of the same stimulus of action, is " troubled with thick- 
coming fancies," walks in her sleep, goes mad and dies. Mac- 
beth endeavors to escape from reflection on his crimes by repel- 
ling their consequences, and banishes remorse for the past by the 
meditation of future mischief. This is not the principle of 
Richard's cruelty, which resembles the cold malignity, the wan- 
ton malice, of a fiend rather than the frailty of human nature. 
Macbeth is goaded on to acts of violence and retaliation by ne- 
cessity ; to Richard, blood is a pastime. There are other es- 
sential differences. Richard is a man of the world, a vulgar, 
plotting, hardened villain, wholly regardless of everything but 
his own ends, and the means to accomplish them. Not so Mac- 
beth. The superstitions of the age, the rude state of society, 
the local scenery and customs, all give a wildness and imaginary 
grandeur to his character. From the strangeness of the events 
that surround him, he is full of amazement and fear ; and 
stands in doubt between the world of reality and the world of 



•^ MACBETH. 



fancy. He sees sights not shown to mortal eye, and Jiears un- 
earthly music. All is tumult and disorder within and without 
his mind ; his purposes recoil upon himself, are broken and 
disjointed ; he is the double thrall of his passions and his evil 
destiny. He treads upon the brink of fate and grows dizzy 
with his situation. Richard is not a character either of imagina- 
tion or pathos, but of pure will. There is no conflict of oppo- 
site feelings in his breast. The apparitions which he sees only 
haunt him in his sleep ; nor does he live like Macbeth in a wak- 
ing dream. There is nothing tight or compact in Macbeth, no 
tenseness of fibre, nor pointed decision of manner. He has in- 
deed considerable energy and manliness of soul ; but then he 
is "subject to all the skyey influences." He is sure of nothing. 
All is left at issue. He runs a tilt with fortune, and is baflled 
with preternatural riddles. The agitation of his mind resem- 
bles the rolling of the sea in a storm, or he is like a lion in the 
toils — fierce, impetuous, and ungovernable. Richard, in the 
busy turbulence of his projects, never loses his self-possession, 
and makes use of every circumstance that occurs as an instru- 
ment of his long-reaching designs. In his last extremity we 
can only regard him as a captured wild beast, but we never en- 
tirely lose our concern for Macbeth, and he calls back all our 
sympathy by that fine close of thoughtful melancholy — 

" My way of life is fallen into the sear, 

The yellow leaf; and that which should accompany old age. 

As honor, troops of friends, I must not look to have ; 

But in their stead, curses not loud but deep. 

Mouth-honor, breath, which the poor heart 

Would fain deny, and dare not." 

We can conceive a common actor to play Richard tolerably 
well ; we can conceive no one to play Macbeth properly, or to 
look like a man who had encountered the Weird Sisters. All 
the actors that we have seen, appear as if they had encountered 
Ihem on the boards of Covent Garden or Drury Lane, but not 
on the heath at Foris, and as if they did not believe what they 
had seen. The Witches of Macbeth, indeed, are ridiculous on 
the modern stage, and we doubt if the Furies of iEschylus would 



MACBETH. 21 



be more respected. The progress of manners and knowledge 
has an influence on the stage, and will in time perhaps destroy 
both tragedy and comedy. Filch's picking pockets in the Beg- 
gar^ s Opera is not so good a jest as it used to be ; by the force 
of the police and of philosophy, Lillo's murders and the ghosts in 
Shakspeare will become obsolete. At last, there will be nothing 
left, good nor bad, to be desired or dreaded, on the theatre or in 
real life. The question which has been started with respect to 
the originality of Shakspeare's Witches, has been well answered 
by Mr. Lamb in his notes to the " Specimens of Early Dramatic 
Poetry." 

"Though some resemblance maybe traced between the charms 
in Macbeth, and the incantations in this play (the Witch of 
Middleton), which is supposed to have preceded it, this coinci- 
dence will not detract much from the originality of Shakspeare. 
His Witches are distinguished from the Witches of Middleton 
by essential differences. These are creatures to whom man or 
woman plotting some dire mischief might resort for occasional 
consultation. Those originate deeds of blood, and begin bad 
impulses to men. From the moment that their eyes first meet 
with Macbeth's, he is «pell-bound. That meeting sways his 
destiny. He can never break the fascination. These Witches 
can hurt the body ; those have power over the soul. Hecate in 
Middleton has a son, a low buffoon ; the hags of Shakspeare 
have neither child of their own, nor seem to be descended from 
any parent. They are foul anomalies, of whom we know not 
whence they are sprung, nor whether they have beginning or 
ending. As they are without human passions, so they seem to 
be without human relations. They come with thunder and light- 
ning, and vanish to airy music. This is all we know of them. 
Except Hecate, they have no names, which heightens their 
mysteriousness. The names, and some of the properties which 
Middleton has given to his hags, excite smiles. The Weird 
Sisters are serious things. Their presence cannot co-exist with 
mirth. But, in a lesser degree, the Witches of Middleton are 
fine creations. Their power too is, in some measure, over the 
mind. They raise jars, jealousies, strifes, like a thick scurf 
o'er Ufe." 



as JULIUS C^SAR. 



JULIUS CJISAR 



JuLiirs C^SAR was one of three principal plays by different 
authors, pitched upon by the celebrated Earl of Halifax to be 
brought out, in a splendid manner, by subscription, in the year 
1707. The other two were the King and no King of Fletcher, 
and Dryden's Maiden Queen. There perhaps might be political 
reasons for this selection, as far as regards our author. Other- 
wise Shakspeare's Julius Caesar is not equal, as a whole, to 
either of his other plays, taken from the Roman history. It is 
inferior in interest to Coriolanus, and, both in interest and power, 
to Antony and Cleopatra. It, however, abounds in admirable 
and affecting passages, and is remarkable for the profound 
knowledge of character, in which Shakspeare could scarcely 
fail. If there is any exception to this remark, it is in the hero 
of the piece himself. We do not much admire the representa- 
tion here given of Julius Csesar, nor do we think it answers to 
the portrait given of him in his Commentaries. He makes sev- 
eral vaporing and rather pedantic speeches, and does nothing. 
Indeed, he has nothing to do. So far the fault of the character 
might be the fault of the plot. 

The spirit with which the poet has entered at once into the 
manners of the common people, and the jealousies and heart- 
burnings of the different factions, is shown in the first scene, 
when Flavins and Marullus, tribunes of the people, and some 
citizens of Rome, appear upon the stage. 

" Flavius. Thou art a cobler, art thou ? 

CoBLER. Truly, Sir, all that I live by, is the awl ; I meddle with 
no trade — man's matters, nor woman's matters, but wifh-al, I am in- 
deed, Sir, a surgeon to old shoes ; when they are in great danger, I recover 
them. 



JULIUS CiESAR. 23 

Flavius. But wherefore art not in thy shop to-day ? 
Why dost thou lead these men about the streets ? 

CoBLER. Truly, Sir, to wear out their shoes, to get myself into more 
work. But indeed, Sir, we make holiday to see Caesar, and rejoice in 
his triumph." 

To this specimen of quaint low humor immediately follows 
that unexpected and animated burst of indignant eloquence, put 
into the mouth of one of the angry tribunes. 

" Marullus, Wherefore rejoice ? — What conquest brings he home i 

What tributaries follow him to Rome, 

To grace in captive-bonds his chariot-wheels ? 

Oh you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome ! 

Knew you not Pompey ? Many a time and oft 

Have you climb'd up to walls and battlements. 

To towers and windows, yea, to chimney-tops, 

Your infants in your arms, and there have sat 

The live-long day with patient expectation. 

To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome : 

And when you saw his chariot but appear. 

Have you not made an universal shout, 

That Tyber trembled underneath his banks, 

To hear the replication of your sounds. 

Made in his concave shores ? 

And do you now put on your best attire ? 

And do you now cull out an holiday ? 

And do you now strew flowers in his way 

That comes in triumph over Pompey's blood ? 

Begone- 

Run to your houses, fall upon your knees. 
Pray to the Gods to intermit the plague. 
That needs must light on this ingratitude." 

The well-known dialogue between Brutus and Cassius, in 
which the latter breaks the design of the conspiracy to the for- 
mer, and partly gains him over to it, is a noble piece of high- 
minded declamation. Cassius's insisting on the pretended effemi- 
nacy of Csesar's character, and his description of their swimming 
across the Tiber together, " once upon a raw and gusty day," 
are among the finest strokes in it. But, perhaps the whole is 
not equal to the short scene which follows when Caesar enters 
with his train. 



24 JULIUS CJESAR. 



" Brutits. The games are done, and Ccesar is returning. 

Cassitts. As they pass by, pluck Casca by the sleeve, 
And he will, after his sour fashion, tell you 
What has proceeded worthy note to-day. 

Brutus. I will do so ; but look you, Cassius — 
The angry spot doth glow on Caesar's brow, 
And all the rest look like a chidden train. 
Calphurnia's cheek is pale ; and Cicero 
Looks with such ferret and such fiery eyes, 
As we have seen him in the Capitol, 
Being crost in conference by some senators. 

Cassius. Casca will tell us what the matter is. 

C^sAR. Antonius 

Antony. Caesar } 

Cjesar. Let me have men about me that are fat, 
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights : 
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. 
He thinks too much ; such men are dangerous. 

Antony. Fear him not, Caesar ; he's not dangerous ; 
He is a noble Roman, and well given. 

C^sAR. Would he were fatter ; but I fear him not : 
Yet if my name were liable to fear, 
I do not know the man I should avoid 
So soon as that spare Cassius. He reads much ; 
He is a great observer ; and he looks 
Quite through the deeds of men. He loves no plays, 
As thou dost, Antony : he hears no music : 
Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort, 
As if he mock'd himself, and scorn'd his spirit. 
That could be mov'd to smile at anything. 
Such men as he be never at heart's ease. 
Whilst they behold a greater than themselves : 
And therefore are they very dangerous. 
I rather tell thee what is to be fear'd 
Than what I fear ; for always I am Caesar 
Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf, 
And tell me truly what thou think'st of him." 

We know hardly any passage more expressive of the genius 
of Shakspeare than this. It is as if he had been actually present, 
had known the different characters, and what they thought of 
one another, and had taken down what he heard and saw, their 
looks, words, and gestures, just as they happened. 

The character of Mark Antony is farther speculated upon 



JULIUS C^SAR. 25. 

where the conspirators deliberate whether he shall fall with 
Caesar. Brutus is against it — 

" And for Mark Antony, think not of him ; 
For he can do no more than Caesar's arm. 
When Caesar's head is off. 

Cassius. Yet do I fear him : 
For in th' ingrafted love he bears to Caesar — 

Brutus. Alas, good Cassius, do not think of him ; 
If he love Caesar, all that he can do 
Is to himself, take thought, and die for Caesar : 
And that were much, he should ; for he is giv'n 
To sports, to wildness, and much company. 

Trebonius. There is no fear in him ; let him not die : 
For he will live, and laugh at this hereafter." 

They were in the wrong ; and Cassius was right. 

The honest manliness of Brutus is, however, sufficient to find 
out the unfitness of Cicero to be included in their enterprise, 
from his affected egotism and literary vanity. 

" O, name him not ; let us not break with him ; 
For he will never follow anything, 
That other men begin." 

His scepticism as to prodigies, and his moralising on the weather 
— " This disturbed sky is not to walk in " — are in the same spirit 
of refined imbecility. 

Shakspeare has in this play and elsewhere shown the same 
penetration into political character and the springs of public 
events as into those of every-day life. For instance, the whole 
design to liberate their country fails from the generous temper 
and overweening confidence of Brutus in the goodness of their 
cause and the assistance of others. Thus it has always been. 
Those who mean well themselves, think well of others, and fall 
a prey to their security. That humanity and sincerity which 
dispose men to resist injustice and tyranny render them unfit 
to cope with the cunning and power of those who are opposed to 
them. The friends of liberty trust to the professions of others, 
because they are themselves sincere, and endeavor to secure the 
public good with the least possible hurt to its enemies, who have 
no regard to anything but their own unprincipled ends, and stick 



26 JULIUS CiESAR. 



at nothing to accomplish them. Cassius was better cut out for 
a conspirator. His heart prompted his head. His habitual 
jealousy made him fear the worst that might happen, and his 
irritability of temper added to his inveteracy of purpose, and 
sharpened his patriotism. The mixed nature of his motives 
made him fitter to contend with bad men. The vices are never 
so well employed as in combating one another. Tyranny and 
servility are to be dealt with after their own fashion, or they will 
triumph over those who spare them. 

The quarrel between Brutus and Cassius is managed in a 
masterly way. The dramatic fluctuation of passion, the calm- 
ness of Brutus, the heat of Cassius, are admirably described ; 
and the exclamation of Cassius on hearing of the death of Portia, 
which he does not learn till after their reconciliation, " How 
'scap'd I killing when I crost you so ?" gives double force to all 
that has gone before. The scene between Brutus and Portia, 
where she endeavors to extort the secret of the conspiracy from 
him, is conceived in the most heroical spirit, and the burst of 
tenderness in Brutus — 

" You are my true and honorable wife ; 
As dear to me as are the ruddy drops 
That visit my sad heart," — 

is justified by her whole behavior. Portia's breathless impa- 
tience to learn the event of the conspiracy, in the dialogue with 
Lucius, is full of passion. The interest which Portia takes in 
Brutus, and that which Calphurnia takes in the fate of Csesar, 
are discriminated with the nicest precision. Mark Antony's 
speech over the dead body of Csesar has been justly admired for 
the mixture of pathos and artifice in it : that of Brutus cer- 
tainly is not so good. 

The entrance of the conspirators to the house of Brutus at 
midnight is rendered very impressive. In the midst of this 
scene, we meet with one of those careless and natural digres- 
sions which occur so frequently and beautifully in Shakspeare. 
After Cassius has introduced his friends one by one, Brutus 
says, 



JULIUS CiESAR. 8t 



" They are all welcome. 
What watchful cares do interpose themselves 
Betwixt your eyes and night ? 

Cassius. Shall I entreat a word ? {.Th^V whisper.) 

Decius. Here lies the east : doth not the day break here ? 

Casca. No. 

CiNNA. pardon, Sir, it doth ; and yon grey lines, 
That fret the clouds, are messengers of day. 

Casca. You shall confess, that you are both deceiv'd: 
Here, as I point my sword, the sun arises, 
Which is a great way growing on the south, 
Weighing the youthful season of the year. 
Some two months hence, up higher toward the north 
He first presents his fire, and the high east 
Stands as the Capitol, directly here." 

We cannot help thinking this graceful familiarity better than all 
the formality in the world. The truth of history in Julius C^sar 
is very ably worked up with dramatic effect. The councils of 
generals, the doubtful turns of battles, are represented to the 
life. The death of Brutus is worthy of him — it has the dignity 
of the Roman senator with the firmness of the Stoic philosopher. 
But what is perhaps better than either, is the little incident of his 
boy, Lucius, falling asleep over his instrument, as he is play- 
ing to his master in his tent, the night before the battle. Nature 
had played him the same forgetful trick once before on the night 
of the conspiracy. The humanity of Brutus is the same on both 
occasions. 



It is no matter : 



Enjoy the honey heavy dew of slumber. 
Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies, 
Which busy care draws in the brains of men. 
Therefore thou sleep'st so sound." 



OTHELLO. 



OTHELLO 



It has been said that tragedy purifies the affections by terror 
and pity. That is, it substitutes imaginary sympathy for mere 
selfishness. It gives us a high and permanent interest, beyond 
ourselves, in humanity as such. It raises the great, the remote, 
and the possible to an equality with the little, the near, and the 
real. It makes man a partaker with his kind. It subdues and 
softens the stubbornness of his will. It teaches him that there 
are and have been others like himself, by showing him as in a 
glass what they have felt, thought, and done. It opens the 
chambers of the human heart. It leaves nothing indifferent to 
us that can afiect our common nature. It excites our sensibility 
by exhibiting the passions wound up to the utmost pitch of the 
power of imagination or the temptation of circumstances ; and 
corrects their fatal excesses in ourselves by pointing to the great- 
er extent of sufferings and crimes to which they have led others. 
Tragedy creates a balance of the affections. It makes us 
thoughtful spectators in the lists of life. It is the refiner of the 
species ; a discipline of humanity. The habitual study of 
poetry and works of imagination is one chief part of a well- 
grounded education. A taste for liberal art is necessary to com- 
plete the character of a gentleman. Science alone is hard and 
mechanical. It exercises the understanding upon things out of 
ourselves, while it leaves the affections unemployed, or engrossed 
with our own immediate, narrow interests. — Othello furnishes 
an illustration of these remarks. It excites our sympathy in an 
extraordinary degree. The moral it conveys has a closer ap- 
plication to the concerns of human life than that of any other of 



OTHELLO. 99 



Shakspeare's plays. " It comes directly home to the bosoms 
and business of men." The pathos in Lear is indeed more 
dreadful and overpowering : but it is less natural, and less of 
every day's occurrence. We have not the same degree of 
sympathy with the passions described in Macbeth. The interest 
in Hamlet is more remote and reflex. That of Othello is at 
once equally profound and affecting. 

The picturesque contrasts of character in this play are almost 
as remarkable as the depth of the passion. The Moor Othello, 
the gentle Desdemona, the villain lago, the good-natured Cassio, 
the fool Roderigo, present a range and variety of character as 
striking and palpable as that produced by the opposition of cos- 
tume in a picture. Their distinguishing qualities stand out to 
the mind's eye, so that even when we are not thinking of their 
actions or sentiments, the idea of their persons is still as present 
to us as ever. These characters and the images they stamp 
upon the mind are the farthest asunder possible, the distance 
between them is immense : yet the compass of knowledge and 
invention which the poet has shown in embodying those extreme 
creations of his genius is only greater than the truth and 
felicity with which he has identified each character with itself, 
or blended their different qualities together in the same story. 
What a contrast the character of Othello forms to that of lago : 
at the same time, the force of conception with which these two 
figures are opposed to each other is rendered still more intense 
by the complete consistency with which the traits of each char- 
acter are brought out in a state of the highest finishing. The 
making one black and the other white, the one unprincipled, the 
other unfortunate in the extreme, would have answered the com- 
mon purposes of effect, and satisfied the ambition of an ordinary 
painter of character. Shakspeare has labored the finer shades 
of difference in both with as much care and skill as if he had 
had to depend on the execution alone for the success of his de- 
sign. On the other hand, Desdemona and iEmilia are not meant 
to be opposed with anything like strong contrast to each other. 
Both are, to outward appearance, characters of common life, not 
more distinguished than women usually are, by difference of 
rank and situation. The diversity of their thoughts and senti- 



30 OTHELLO. 

merits is however laid as open, their minds separated from each 
other by signs as plain and as little to be mistaken, as the com- 
plexions of their husbands. 

The movement of the passion in Othello is exceedingly differ- 
ent from that of Macbeth. In Macbeth there is a violent strug- 
gle between opposite feelings, between ambition and the stings 
of conscience, almost from first to last : in Othello, the doubtful 
conflict between contrary passions, though dreadful, continues 
only for a short time, and the chief interest is excited by the 
alternate ascendency of different passions, the entire and unfore- 
seen change from the fondest love and most unbounded confi- 
dence to the tortures of jealousy and the madness of hatred. 
The revenge of Othello, after it has once taken thorough posses- 
sion of his mind, never quits it, but grows stronger and stronger 
at every moment of its delay. The nature of the Moor is noble, 
confiding, tender, and generous ; but his blood is of the most 
inflammable kind ; and being once roused by a sense of his 
wrongs, he is stopped by no considerations of remorse or pity 
till he has given a loose to all the dictates of his rage and his 
despair. It is in working his noble nature up to this extremity 
through rapid but gradual transitions, in raising passion to its 
height from the smallest beginnings and in spite of all obstacles, 
in painting the expiring conflict between love and hatred, tender- 
ness and resentment, jealousy and remorse, in unfolding the 
strength and weaknesses of our nature, in uniting sublimity of 
thought with the anguish of the keenest wo, in putting in motion 
the various impulses that agitate this our mortal being, and at 
last blending them in that noble tide of deep and sustained pas- 
sion, impetuous but majestic, that " flows on to the Propontic, 
and knows no ebb," that Shakspeare has shown the mastery of 
his genius and of his power over the human heart. The third 
act of Othello is his master-piece, not of knowledge or passion 
separately, but of the two combined ; of the knowledge of char- 
acter with the expression of passion, of consummate art in the 
keeping up of appearances with the profound workings of nature, 
and the convulsive movements of uncontrollable agony, of the 
power of inflicting torture and of suffering it. Not only is the 
tumult of passion heaved up from the very bottom of the soul, but 



OTHELLO. 31 



every the slightest undulation of feeling is seen on the surface 
as it arises from the impulses of imagination or the different pro- 
babilities maliciously suggested by lago. The progressive pre- 
paration for the catastrophe is wonderfully managed from the 
Moor's first gallant recital of the story of his love, of " the spells 
and witchcraft he had used," from his unlooked-for and roman- 
tic success, the fond satisfaction with which he dotes on his own 
happiness, the unreserved tenderness of Desdemona and her in- 
nocent importunities in favor of Cassio, irritating the suspicions 
instilled into her husband's mind by the perfidy of lago, and 
rankling there to poison, till he loses all command of himself, 
and his rage can only be appeased by blood. She is introduced, 
just before lago begins to put his scheme in practice, pleading 
for Cassio with all the thoughtless gaiety of friendship and win- 
ning confidence in the love of Othello. 

" What ! Michael Cassio ? 
That came a wooing with you, and so many a time. 
When I have spoke of you dispraisingly. 
Hath ta'en your part, to have so much to do 
To bring him in ? — Why this is not a boon : 
'T is as I should entreat you wear your gloves, 
Or feed on nourishing meats, or keep you warm ; 
Or sue to you to do a peculiar profit 
To your person. Nay, when 1 have a suit, 
Wherein I mean to touch your love indeed, 
It shall be full of poise, and fearful to be granted." 

Othello's confidence, at first only staggered by broken hints 
and insinuations, recovers itself at sight of Desdemona ; and he 
exclaims, 

" If she be false, O then Heav'n mocks itself; 
I'll not believe it." 

But presently after, on brooding over his suspicions by himself, 
and yielding to his apprehensions of the worst, his smothered 
jealousy breaks out into open fury, and he returns to demand 
satisfaction of lago like a wild beast stung with the envenomed 
shaft of the hunters. " Look where he comes," &c. In this 
state of exasperation and violence, after the first paroxysms of 



92 OTHELLO. 



his grief and tenderness have had their vent in that passionate 
apostrophe, " I felt not Cassio's kisses on her lips," lago by false 
aspersions, and by presenting the most revolting images to his 
mind,* easily turns the storm of passion from himself against 
Desdemona, and works him up into a trembling agony of doubt 
and fear, in which he abandons all his love and hopes in a 
breath. 

" Now do I see 'tis true. Look here, lago, 
All my fond love thus do I blow to Heav'n. 'T is gone. 
Arise, black vengeance, from the hollow hell ; 
Yield up, love, thy crown and hearted throne 
To tyrannous hate ! Swell, bosom, with thy fraught ; 
For 'tis of aspics' tongues." 

From this time, his raging thoughts " never look back, ne'er 
ebb to humble love," till his revenge is sure of its object, the 
painful regrets and involuntary recollections of past circum- 
stances which cross his mind amidst the dim trances of passion, 
aggravating the sense of his wrongs, but not shaking his pur- 
pose. Once, indeed, where lago shows him Cassio with the 
handkerchief in his hand, and making sport (as he thinks) of 
his misfortunes, the intolerable bitterness of his feelings, the 
extreme sense of shame, makes him fall to praising her accom- 
plishments, and relapse into a momentary fit of weakness, " Yet 
the pity of it, lago ! — O, lago, the pity of it !" But this return- 
ing fondness only serves, as it is managed by lago, to whet his 
revenge, and set his heart more against her. In his conversa- 
tions with Desdemona, the persuasion of her guilt, and the 
immediate proofs of her duplicity seem to irritate his resentment 
and aversion to her ; but in the scene immediately preceding 
her death, the recollection of his love returns upon him in all its 
tenderness and force ; and after her death, he all at once forgets 
his wrongs in the sudden and irreparable sense of his loss : 

" My wife' ! my wife ! what wife ? I have no wife. 
Oh insupportable ! oh heavy hour ! " 

• See the passage beginning, " It is impossible you should see this, were 
they as prime as goats," &,c. 



OTHELLO, 33 



This happens before he is assured of her innocence ; but after- 
wards his remorse is as dreadful as his revenge has been, and 
yields only to fixed and death-like despair. His farewell speech, 
before he kills himself, in which he conveys his reasons to the 
senate for the murder of his wife, is equal to the first speech, In 
which he gave them an account of his courtship of her, and 
*' his whole course of love." Such an ending was alone worthy 
of such a commencement. 

If anything could add to the force of our sympathy with 
Othello, or compassion for his fate, it would be the frankness 
and generosity of his nature, which so little deserve it. When 
lago first begins to practise upon his unsuspecting friendship, 
he answers — 



'T is not to make me jealous, 



To say — my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company. 
Is free of speech, sings, plays, and dances well ; 
Where virtue is, these are most virtuous. 
Nor from my own weak merits will I draw 
The smallest fear or doubt of her revolt ; 
For she had eyes, and chose me," 

This character is beautifully (and with affecting simplicity) 
confirmed by what Desdemona herself says of him to ^Emilia 
after she has lost the handkerchief, the first pledge of his love 
to her. 

*' Believe me, I had rather have lost my purse 
Full of cruzadoes. And, but my noble Moor 
Is true of mind, and made of no such baseness, 
As jealous creatures are, it were enough 
To put him to ill thinking. 

Emilia. Is he not jealous ? 

Desdemona. Who, he ? 1 think the sun where he w^as born 
I Drew all such humors from him." ^ 

In a short speech of ^Emilia's, there occurs one of those side-, 
intimations of the fluctuations of passion which we seldom meet 
with but in Shakspeare. After Othello has resolved upon the. 
death of his wife, and bids her dismiss her attendant for the, 
night, she answers, 

4 



34 OTHELLO. 



** I will, my Lord. 
iEMiLiA. How goes it now ? He looks gentler than he did?* 

Shakspeare has here put into half a line what some authors 
wpuld have spun out into ten set speeches. 

The character of Desdennona herself is inimitable both in 
itself, and as it contrasts with Othello's groundless jealousy, and 
with the foul conspiracy of which she is the innocent victim. 
Her beauty and external graces are only indirectly glanced at : 
we see " her visage in her mind ; " her character everywhere 
predominates over her person. 

♦* A maiden never bold : 

Of spirit so still and quiet, that her motion 

Blushed at itself." 

There is one fine compliment paid to her by Cassio, who exclaini« 
triumphantly when she comes ashore at Cyprus after the storm, 

'* Tempests themselves, high seas, and howling winds, 
As having sense of beauty, do omit 
Their mortal natures, letting safe go by 
The divine Desdemona." 

In general, as is the case with most of Shakspeare's females, 
we lose sight of her personal charms in her attachment and 
devotedness to her husband. " She is subdued even to the very 
quality of her lord ;" and to Othello's " honors and his valiant 
parts her soul and fortunes consecrates." The lady protests so 
much herself, and she is as good as her word. The truth of 
conception, with which timidity and boldness are united in the 
same character, is marvellous. The extravagance of her reso- 
lutions, the pertinacity of her affections, may be said to arise 
out of the gentleness of her nature. They imply an unreserved 
reliance on the purity of her own intentions, an entire surrender 
of her fears to her love, a knitting of herself (heart and soul) 
to the fate of another. Bating the commencement of her pas- 
sion, which is a little fantastical and headstrong (though even 
that may perhaps be consistently accounted for from her ina- 



OTHELLO. 



bility to resist a rising inclination *), her whole character con- 
sists in having no will of her own, no prompter but her obedi- 
ence. Her romantic turn is only a consequence of the domestic 
and practical part of her disposition ; and, instead of following 
Othello to the wars, she would gladly have " remained at home 
a moth of peace," if her husband could have stayed with her. 
Her resignation and angelic sweetness of temper do not desert 
her at the last. The scenes in which she laments and tries to 
account for Othello's estrangement from her are exquisitely 
beautiful. After he has struck her, and called her names, she 
says, 

" good lago, 

What shall I do to win my lord again ? 

Good friend, go to him ; for by the light of heaven, 

I know not how I lost him. Here I kneel : — - 

If e'er my will did trespass 'gainst his love. 

Either in discourse, or thought, or actual deed, 

Or that mine eyes, mine ears, or any sense 

Delighted them on any other form ; 

Or that I do not, and ever did, 

And ever will, though he do shake me off 

To beggarly divorcement, love him dearly, 

Comfort forswear me ! Unkindness may do much, 

And his unkindness may defeat my life, 

But never taint my love. 

I AGO. I pray you be content ; 't is but his humor. 
The business of the state does him offence. 

Desdemona. If 'twere no other !"— 

The scene which follows with jEmilia and the song of the 
Willow, are equally beautiful, and show the author's extreme 
power of varying the expression of passion, in all its moods and 
in all circumstances. 

•* ^Emilia. Would you had never seen him ! 

Desdemona. So would not I : my love doth so approve him. 
That even his stubbornness, his checks, his frowns. 
Have grace and favor in them," &c. 

• *« lACfo. Ay, too gentle. 

Othello. Nay, that's certain." 



36 OTHELLO. 



Not the unjust suspicions of Othello, not lago's treachery, place 
Desdemona in a nnore amiable or interesting light than the casual 
conversation (half earnest, half jest) between her and Emilia, 
on the common behavior of women to their husbands. This 
dialogue takes place just before the last fatal scene. If Othello 
had overheard it, it would have prevented the whole catastrophe ; 
but then it would have spoiled the play. 

The character of lago is one of the supererogations of Shak- 
speare's genius. Some persons, more nice than wise, have 
thought this whole character unnatural, because his villainy is 
mihout a sufficient motive. Shakspeare, who was as good a 
philosopher as he was a poet, thought otherwise. He knew 
that the love of power, which is another name for the love of 
mischief, is natural to man. He would know this as well or 
better than if it had been demonstrated to him by a logical dia- 
gram, merely from seeing children paddle in the dirt, or kill 
flies for sport. We might ask those who think the character of 
lago not natural, why they go to see it performed, but from the 
interest it excites, the sharper edge which it sets on the curiosity 
and imagination ? Why do they go to see tragedies in general ? 
Why do we always read the accounts in the newspapers of 
dreadful fires and shocking murders, but for the sam.e reason ? 
Why do so many persons frequent trials and executions, or why 
do the lower classes almost universally take delight in barbarous 
sports and cruelty to animals, but because there is a natural 
tendency in the mind to strong excitement, a desire to have its 
faculties roused and stimulated to the utmost ? Whenever this 
principle is not under the restraint of humanity, or the sense of 
moral obligation, there are no excesses to which it will not of 
itself give rise, without the assistance of any other motive, either 
of passion or self-interest. lago in fact belongs to a class of 
characters common to Shakspeare, and at the same time peculiar 
to him ; whose heads are as acute and active as their hearts are 
hard and callous. . lago is, to be sure, an extreme instance of 
the kind ; that is to say, of diseased intellectual activity, with 
an almost perfect indifference to moral good or evil, or rather 
with a decided preference of the latter, because it falls more 
readily in with his favorite propensity, gives greater zest to his 



OTHELLa 



thoughts and scope to his actions. Be it observed, too (for the 
sake of those who are for squaring all human actions by the 
maxims of Rochefoucauld), that he is quite or nearly as indif- 
ferent to his own fate as to that of others ; he runs all risks for 
a trifling and doubtful advantage ; and is himself the dupe and 
victim of his ruling passion — an insatiable craving after action 
of the most difficult and dangerous kind. " Our ancient " is a 
philosopher, who fancies that a lie that kills has more point in it 
than an alliteration or an antithesis ; who thinks a fatal experi- 
ment on the peace of a family a better thing than watching the 
palpitations in the heart of a flea in a microscope ; who plots 
the ruin of his friends as an exercise for his ingenuity, and 
stabs men in the dark to prevent ennui. Now this, though it be 
sport, yet is dreadful sport. There is no room for trifling and 
indifference, nor scarcely for the appearance of it ; the very 
object of his whole plot is to keep his faculties stretched on the 
rack, in a state of watch and ward, in a sort of breathless sus- 
pense, without a moment's interval of repose. He has a despe- 
rate stake to play for, like a man who fences with poisoned 
weapons, and has business enough on his hands to call for the 
whole stock of his sober circumspection, his dark duplicity, and 
insidious gravity. He resembles a man who sits down to play 
at chess, for the sake of the difficulty and complication of the 
game, and who immediately becomes absorbed in it. His amuse- 
ments, if such they may be called, are severe and saturnine — 
even his wit blisters. His gaiety, such as it is, arises from the 
success of his treachery ; his ease from the torture he has in- 
flicted on others. 

Even if other circumstances permitted it, the part he has to 
play with Othello requires that he should assume the most se- 
rious concern, and something of the plausibility of a confessor. 
" His cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o' Bed- 
lam." He is repeatedly called " honest lago," which looks as 
if there were something suspicious in his appearance which 
admitted a different construction. The tone which he adopts 
in the scenes with Roderigo, Desdemona, and Cassio, is only a 
relaxation from the more arduous business of the play, yet there 
is in all his conversation an inveterate misanthropy, a licentious 



OTHELLO. 



keenness of perception, which is always sagacious of evil, and 
snuffs up the tainted scent of its quarry with rancorous delight. 

The general ground-work of the character, however, is not 
absolute malignity, but a want of moral principle, or an indif- 
ference to the real consequences of the actions, which the med- 
dling perversity of his disposition, and love of immediate ex- 
citement, lead him to commit. He is an amateur of tragedy 
in real life, and instead of exercising his ingenuity on imaginary 
characters, or long- forgotten incidents, he takes the bolder and 
more desperate course of getting up his plot at home, casts the 
principal parts among his nearest friends and connexions, and 
rehearses it in downright earnest, with steady nerves and una- 
bated resolution. The character is a complete abstraction of 
the intellectual from the moral being ; or, in other words, con- 
sists in an absorption of every common feeling in the virulence 
of his understanding, the deliberate wilfulness of his purposes, 
and his restless, untameable love of mischievous contrivance. 

In the general dialogue and reflections, which are an accom- 
paniment to the progress of the catastrophe, there is a constant 
overflowing of gall and bitterness. The acuteness of his malice 
fastens upon everything alike, and pursues the most distant 
analogy of evil with provoking sagacity. His mirth is not natu- 
ral and cheerful, but forced and extravagant, partaking of the 
intense activity of mind and cynical contempt of others in which 
it originates. lago is not, like Candide, a believer in optimism, 
but seems to have a thorough hatred or distrust of everything 
of the kind, and to dwell with gloating satisfaction on whatever 
can interrupt the enjoyment of others, and gratify his moody 
irritability. 

One of his most characteristic speeches is that immediately 
after the marriage of Othello. 

"' RoDERiGO. What a full fortune does the thick lips owe. 
If he can carry 't thus ! 

Iago. Call up her father : 
Rouse him {Othello), make after him, poison his delight, 
Proclaim him in the streets, incense her kinsmen : 
And though he in a fertile climate dwell. 
Plague him with flies : though that his joy be joy, 



OTHELLO. 



Yet throw such changes of vexation on *t. 
As it may lose some color." 

The pertinacious logical following up of his favorite princi- 
ple in this passage is admirable. 

In the next passage, his imagination runs riot in the mischief 
he is plotting, and breaks out into the wildness and impetuosity 
of real enthusiasm. 

" RoDERiGo. Here is her father's house : I'll call aloud. 

Iago. Do, with like timorous accent and dire yell. 
As when, by night and negligence, the j5re 
la spied in populous cities.'' 

One of his most favorite topics, on which he is rich indeed, 
and in descanting on which his spleen serves him for a Muse, 
is the disproportionate match between Desdemona and the Moor. 
This is a clue to the character of the lady which he is by no 
means ready to part with. It is brought forward in the first 
scene, and he recurs to it, when in answer to his insinuations 
against Desdemona, Roderigo says, 

" I cannot believe that in her — she's full of most bless'd conditions. 
Iago. Bless'd fig's end ! The wine she drinks is made of grapes : if she 
had been bless'd, she would never have married the Moor." 

And again with still more spirit and fatal effect afterwards, 
when he turns this very suggestion arising in Othello's own 
breast to her prejudice. 

" Othello. And yet how nature erring from itself — 
Tago. Ay, there's the point; — as, to be bold with you, 

Not to affect many proposed matches 

Of her own clime, complexion, and degree," &c. 

This is probing to the quick. Iago here turns the character 
of poor Desdemona, as it were, inside out. It is certain that 
nothing but the genius of Shakspeare could have preserved the 
entire interest and delicacy of the part, and have even drawn 
an additional elegance and dignity from the peculiar circum- 



40 OTHELLO. 



stances in which she is placed. The character indeed has 
always had the greatest charm for minds of the finest sensibility. 
For our own part, we are a little of lago's council in this mat- 
ter ; and all circumstances considered, and platonics out of the 
question, if we were to cast the complexion of Desdemona 
physiognomically, we should say she had a very fair skin, and 
very light auburn hair, inclining to yellow. We at the same 
rime give her credit for purity and delicacy of sentiment ; but 
U so happens that purity and grossness sometimes 

" Nearly are allied, 
And thin partitions do their bounds divide." 

Yet the reverse does not hold ; so uncertain and undefinable a 
thing is moral character ! It is no wonder that lago had some 
contempt for it, "who knew all qualities of human dealings with 
a learned spirit." There is considerable gaiety and ease in his 
dialogue with ^Emilia and Desdemona on their landing. It is 
then holiday time with him ; but yet the general satire is biting, 
and his idea of human character is finely expressed in what he 
says to Desdemona. when she asks him how he would praise her — 

*♦ Oh, gentle lady, do not put me to it, 
For I am nothing if not critical." 

The habitual licentiousness of lago's conversation is not to be 
traced to the pleasure he takes in gross or lascivious images, but 
to his desire of finding out the worst side of everything, and of 
proving himself an over-match for appearances. He has none 
of " the milk of human kindness " in his composition. His ima- 
gination rejects everything that has not a strong infusion of the 
most unpalatable ingredients ; his moral constitution digests only 
poisons. Virtue or goodness or whatever has the least " relish 
of salvation in it," is, to his depraved appetite, sickly and in- 
sipid : and he even resents the good opinion entertained of his 
own integrity, as if it were an affront cast on the masculine 
sense and spirit of his character. Thus, at the meeting between 
Othello and Desdemona, he exclaims — " Oh, you are well tuned 
now : but I'll set down the pegs that make this music, as honest 



OTHELLO. 41 



as I am " — his character of honhommie not sitting at all easily 
upon him. In the scenes with Othello, where he has to put his 
passion for theoretical evil into practice, with great risk to him- 
self, and with dreadful consequences to others, he is proportion- 
ably guarded, insidious, dark, and deliberate. Nothing ever 
came up to the profound dissimulation and dexterous artifice of 
the well-known dialogue in the third act, where he first enters 
upon the execution of his design. 

" Iago. My noble lord. 

Othello, What dost thou say, Iago ? 

Iago. Did Michael Cassio, 
When you woo'd my lady, know of your love ? 

Othello. He did, from first to last. 
Why dost thou ask ? 

Iago. But for a satisfaction of my thought, 
No further harm. 

Othello. Why of thy thought, Iago ? 

Iago, I did not think he had been acquainted with her. 

Othello. yes, and went between us very oft — 

Iago, Indeed ? 

Othello. Indeed ! ay, indeed. Discern'st thou aught in that ? 
Is he not honest ? 

Iago. Honest, my lord .> 

Othello, Ay, honest ? 

Iago, My lord, for aught I know. 

Othello, What dost thou think ? 

Iago. Think, my lord ? 

Othello. Think, my lord .' By heaven thou echo'st me, 
As if there was some monster in thy thought 
Too hideous to be shown," — 

The stops and breaks, the deep internal workings of treachery 
under the mask of love and honesty, the anxious watchfulness, 
the cool earnestness, and if we may so say, the passion of hy- 
pocrisy marked in every line, receive their last finishing in that 
inimitably characteristic burst of pretended indignation at Othel- 
lo's doubts of his sincerity. 

" grace ! Heaven forgive me ! 

Are you a man ? Have you a soul or sense ? 

God be wi' you ; take mine office. wretchea fool. 



OTHELLO. 



That liv'st to make thine honesty a vice ! 

monstrous world ! Take note, take note, world, 
To be direct and honest, is not safe, 

1 thank you for this profit ; and from hence 

I'll love no friend, since love breeds such offence," 

If lago is detestable enough when he has business on his 
hands and all his engines at work, he is still worse when he has 
nothing to do, and we only see into the hoUowness of his heart. 
His indifference when Othello falls into a swoon, is perfectly 
diabolical, but quite in character. 

" Iago. How is it. General ? Have you not hurt your head ? 
Othello. Dost thou mock me ? 
Iago. I mock you not, by Heaven," &c. 

The part indeed would hardly be tolerated, even as a foil to 
the virtue and generosity of the other characters in the play, 
but for its indefatigable industry and inexhaustible resources, 
which divert the attention of the spectator (as well as his own) 
from the end he has in view to the means by which it must be 
accomplished. Edmund the Bastard in Lear is something of the 
same character, placed in less difficult circumstances. Zanga 
is a vulgar caricature of it. 



TIMON OF ATHENS. 4S 



TIMON OP ATHENS- 



TiMON OF Athens always appeared to us to be written with 
as intense a feeling of his subject as any one play of Shakspeare. 
It is one of the few in which he seems to be in earnest through- 
out, never to trifle or go out of his way. He does not relax in 
his efforts, nor lose sight of the unity of his design. It is the 
only play of our author in which spleen is the predominant 
feeling of the mind. It is as much a satire as a play : and con- 
tains some of the finest pieces of invective possible to be con- 
ceived, both in the snarling, captious answers of the cynic Ape- 
mantus, and in the impassioned and more terrible imprecations 
of Timon. The latter remind the classical reader of the force 
and swelling impetuosity of the moral declamations in Juvenal, 
while the former have all the keenness and caustic severity of 
the old Stoic Philosophers. The soul of Diogenes appears to 
have been seated on the lips of Apemantus. The churlish 
profession of misanthropy in the cynic is contrasted with the 
profound feeling of it in Timon, and also with the soldier-like 
and determined resentment of Alcibiades against his country- 
men, who have banished him, though this forms only an inciden- 
tal episode in the tragedy. 

The fable consists of a single event ; — of the transition from 
the highest pomp and profusion of artificial refinement to the 
most abject state of savage life, and privation of all social inter- 
course. The change is as rapid as it is complete ; nor is the 
description of the rich and generous Timon, banquetting in 
gilded palaces, pampered by every luxury, prodigal of his hos- 
pitality, courted by crowds of flatterers, poets, painters, lords, 
ladies, who — 



44 TIMON OF ATHENS. 



" Follow his strides, his lobbies fill with tendance, 
Rain sacrificial whisperings in his ear ; 
And through him drink the free air"— 

more striking than that of the sudden falling off of his friends 
and fortune, and his naked exposure in a wild forest digging 
roots from the earth for his sustenance, with a lofty spirit of self- 
denial, and bitter scorn cf the world, which raise him higher in 
our esteem than the dazzling gloss of prosperity could do. He 
grudges himself the means of life, and is only busy in preparing 
his grave. How forcibly is the difference between what he was, 
and what he is described in Apemantus's taunting questions, 
when he comes to reproach him with the change in his way of 
life ! 



" What, think'st thou 



That the bleak air, thy boisterous chamberlain. 

Will put thy shirt on warm ? will these mossed trees 

That have out-liv'd the eagle, page thy heels. 

And skip where thou point'st out ? will the cold brook. 

Candied with ice, caudle thy morning taste 

To cure thy o'er-night's surfeit ? Call the creatures, 

Whose naked natures live in all the spight 

Of wreakful heav'n, whose bare unhoused trunks. 

To the conflicting elements expos'd. 

Answer mere nature, bid them flatter thee." 

The manners are everywhere preserved with distinct truth. 
The poet and painter are very skilfully played off against 
one another, both affecting great attention to the other, and each 
taken up with his own vanity, and the superiority of his own 
art. Shakspeare has put into the mouth of the former a very 
lively description of the genius of poetry and of his own in par- 
ticular. 



A thing slipt idly from me. 



Our poesy is as a gum, which issues 
From whence 'tis nourish'd. The fire i' the flint 
Shows not till it be struck : our gentle flame 
Provokes itself— and like the current flies 
Each bound it chafes." 



TIMON OF ATHENS. 45 

The hollow friendship and shuffling evasions of the Athenian 
lords, their smooth professions and pitiful ingratitude, are very 
satisfactorily exposed, as well as the different disguises to which 
the meanness of self-love resorts in such cases to hide a want of 
generosity and good faith. The lurking selfishness of Apeman- 
tus does not pass undetected amidst the grossness of his sarcasms 
and his contempt for the pretensions of others. Even the two 
courtezans who accompany Alcibiades to the cave of Timon are 
very characteristically sketched ; and the thieves who come to 
visit him are also " true men " in their way. — An exception to 
this general picture of selfish depravity is found in the old and 
honest steward Flavins, to whom Timon pays a full tribute of 
tenderness. Shakspeare was unwilling to draw a picture " all 
over ugly with hypocrisy .^^ He owed this character to the good- 
natured solicitations of his Muse. His mind was well said by 
Ben Jonson to be the " sphere of humanity." 

The moral sententiousness of this play equals that of Lord 
Bacon's Treatise on the Wisdom of the Ancients, and is indeed 
seasoned with greater variety. Every topic of contempt or in- 
dignation is here exhausted ; but, while the sordid licentious- 
ness of Apemantus, which turns everything to gall and bitterness, 
shows only the natural virulence of his temper and antipathy to 
good or evil alike, Timon does not utter an imprecation without 
betraying the extravagant workings of disappointed passion, of 
love altered to hate. Apemantus sees nothing good in any ob- 
ject, and exaggerates whatever is disgusting : Timon is tormented 
with the perpetual contrast between things and appearances ; 
between the fresh, tempting outside and the rottenness within, 
and invokes mischiefs on the heads of mankind proportioned to 
the sense of his wrongs and of their treacheries. He impatiently 
cries out, when he finds the gold, 

" This yellow slave 
Will knit and break religions ; bless the accurs'd ; 
Make the hoar leprosy ador'd ; place thieves, 
And give them title, knee and approbation. 
With senators on the bench ; this is it, 
That makes the wappen'd widow wed again ; 
She, whom the spital-house 



46 TIMON OF ATHENS. 



Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spiced 
To th' April day again.^* 

One of his most dreadful imprecations is that which occurs 
immediately on his leaving Athens. 

" Let me look back upon thee, O thou wall, 
That girdlest in those wolves I Dive in the earth. 
And fence not Athens ! Matrons, turn incontinent ; 
Obedience fail in children ; slaves and fools 
Pluck the grave wrinkled senate from the bench, 
And minister in their steads. To general filths 
Convert o' th' instant green virginity ! 
Do't in your parents' eyes. Bankrupts, hold fast; 
Rather than render back, out with your knives, 
And cut your trusters' throats ! Bound servants, steal : 
Large-handed robbers your grave masters are, 
And pill by law. Maid, to thy master's bed : 
Thy mistress is o' th' brothel. Son of sixteen. 
Pluck the lin'd crutch from thy old limping sire, 
And with it beat his brains out ! Fear and piety, 
Religion to the Gods, peace, justice, truth. 
Domestic awe, night-rest, and neighborhood. 
Instructions, manners, mysteries and trades, 
Degrees, observances, customs, and laws. 
Decline to your confounding contraries ; 
And let confusion live ! — Plagues incident to men. 
Your potent and infectious fevers heap 
On Athens, ripe for stroke ! Thou cold sciatica, 
Cripple our senators, that their limbs may halt 
As lamely as their manners ! Lust and liberty 
Creep in the minds and manners of our youth. 
That 'gainst the stream of virtue they may strive. 
And drown themselves in riot ! Itches, blains, 
Sow all th' Athenian bosoms ; and their crop 
Be general leprosy : breath infect breath, 
That their society (as their friendship) may 
Be merely poison !" 

Timon here is just as ideal in his passion for ill as he had 
before been in his belief of good. Apemantus was satisfied with 
the mischief existing in the world, and with his own ill-nature. 
One of the most decisive intimations of Timon's morbid jealousy 
of appearances is in his answer to Apemantus, who asks him, 



TIMON OF ATHENS. 47 

" What things in the world canst thou nearest compare with thy flatter- 
era?" 
TiMON. Women nearest : but men, men are the things themselves.'* 

Apemantus, it is said, " loved few things better than to abhor 
himself." This is not the case with Timon, who neither loves 
to abhor himself nor others. All his vehement misanthropy is 
forced, up-hill work. From the slippery turns of fortune, from 
the turmoils of passion and adversity, he wishes to sink into the 
quiet of the grave. On that subject his thoughts are intent, on 
that he finds time and place to grow romantic. He digs his own 
grave by the sea-shore ; contrives his funeral ceremonies amidst 
the pomp of desolation, and builds his mausoleum of the ele- 
ments. 

" Come not to me again : but say to Athens, 
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion 
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood ; 
Which once a-day with his embossed froth 
The turbulent surge shall cover. — Thither come, 
And let my grave-stone be your oracle." 

And again, Alcibiades, after reading his epitaph, says of him, 

" These well express in thee thy latter spirits : 
Though thou abhorred'st in us our human griefs, 
Scorn'd'st our brain's flow, and those our droplets, which 
From niggard nature fall ; yet rich conceit 
Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye 
On thy low grave :" 

thus making the winds his funeral dirge, his mourner the mur- 
muring ocean ; and seeking in the everlasting solemnities of 
nature oblivion of the transitory solendor of his life-time. 



«S COEIOLANUS. 



CORIOLANUS 



Shakspeare has in this play shown himself well versed in history 
and state-affairs. Coriolanus is a store-house of political com. 
monplaces. Any one who studies it may save himself the trouble 
of reading Burke's Reflections, or Paine's Rights of Man, or the 
Debates in both Houses of Parliament since the French Revolu- 
tion or our own. The arguments for and against aristocracy or 
democracy, on the privileges of the few and the claims of the 
many, on liberty and slavery, power and the abuse of it, peace 
and war, are here very ably handled, with the spirit of a poet 
and the acuteness of a philosopher. Shakspeare himself seems 
to have had a leaning to the arbitrary side of the question, per- 
haps from some feeling of contempt for his own origin ; and to 
have spared no occasion of baiting the rabble. What he says 
of them is very true : what he says of their betters is also very 
true, though he dwells less upon it. The cause of the people is 
indeed but ill calculated as a subject for poetry ; it admits of 
rhetoric, which goes into argument and explanation, but it pre- 
sents no immediate or distinct images to the mind, " no jutting 
frieze, buttress, or coigne of vantage " for poetry " to make its 
pendant and procreant cradle in." The language of poetry 
naturally falls in with the language of power. The imagination 
is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty ; it takes from one 
thing to add to another : it accumulates circumstances together 
to give the greatest possible effect to a favorite object. The un- 
derstanding is a dividing and measuring faculty : it judges of 
things, not according to their immediate impression on the mind, 
but according to their relations to one another. The one is a 
monopolizing faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of pre- 



CORIOLANUS. 49 

sent excitement by inequality and disproportion ; the other is a 
distributive faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of ultimate 
good, by justice and proportion. The one is an aristocratical, 
the other a republican faculty. The principle of poetry is a 
very anti-le veiling principle. It aims at effect, it exists by con- 
trast. It admits of no medium. It is everything by excess. It 
rises above the ordinary standard of sufferings and crimes. It 
presents an imposing appearance. It shows its head turreted, 
crowned and crested. Its front is gilt and blood-stained. Be- 
fore it, " it carries noise, and behind it, it leaves tears." It 
has its altars and its victims, sacrifices, human sacrifices. 
Kings, priests, nobles, are its train-bearers ; tyrants and slaves 
its executioners. " Carnage is its daughter." Poetry is right- 
royal. It puts the individual for the species, the one above the 
infinite many, might before right. A lion hunting a flock of 
sheep or a herd of wild asses, is a more poetical object than his 
prey ; and we even take part with the lordly beasts, because 
our vanity or some other feeling makes us disposed to place our- 
selves in the situation of the strongest party. So we feel some 
concern for the poor citizens of Rome when they meet together 
to compare their wants and grievances, till Coriolanus comes in, 
and with blows and big words drives this set of " poor rats," this 
rascal scum, to their homes and beggary, before him. There is 
nothing heroical in a multitude of miserable rogues not wishing 
to be starved, or complaining that they are like to be so ; but 
when a single man comes forward to brave their cries, and to 
make them submit to the last indignities, from mere pride and 
self-will, our admiration of his prowess is immediately coupled 
with contempt for their pusillanimity. The insolence of power 
is stronger than the plea of necessity. The tame submission to 
usurped authority, or even the natural resistance to it, has nothing 
to excite or flatter the imagination ; it is the assumption of a 
right to insult or oppress others, that carries an imposing air of 
superiority with it. We had rather be the oppressor than the 
oppressed. 

The love of power in ourselves, and the admiration of it in 
others, are both natural to man : the one makes him a tyrant, the 
other a slave. Wrong dressed out in pride, pomp, and circum- 
5 



50 CORIOLANUS. 



stance, has more attraction than abstract right. Coriolanus com- 
plains of the fickleness of the people : yet the instant he cannot 
gratify his pride and obstinacy at their expense, he turns his 
arms against his country. If his country was not worth defend- 
ing, why did he build his pride on its defence ? He is a conque- 
ror and a hero ; he conquers other countries, and makes this a 
plea for enslaving his own ; and when he is prevented from doing 
so, he leagues with its enemies to destroy his country. He rates 
the people " as if he were a God to punish, and not a man of 
their infirmity." He scoffs at one of their tribunes for maintain- 
ing their rights and franchises : " Mark you his absolute shall ?" 
not marking his own absolute will io ioke everything from them ; 
his impatience of the slightest opposition to his own pretensions 
being in proportion to their arrogance and absurdity. If the 
great and powerful had the beneficence and wisdom of gods, then 
all this would have been well : if with greater knowledge of 
what is good for the people, they had as great a care for their in- 
terest as they have for their own, if they were seated above the 
world, sympathizing with the welfare, but not feeling the passions 
of men, receiving neither good nor hurt from them, but bestow- 
ing their benefits as free gifts on them, they might then rule over 
them like another Providence. But this is not the case. Corio- 
lanus is unwilling that the senate should show their " cares" for 
the people, lest their " cares" should be construed into " fears," 
to the subversion of all due authority ; and he is no sooner dis- 
appointed in his schemes to deprive the people not only of the 
cares of the state, but of all power to redress themselves, than 
Volumnia is made madly to exclaim, 

" Now the red pestilence strike all trades in Rome, 
And occupations perish." 

This is but natural : it is but natural for a mother to have 
more regard for her son than for a whole city ; but then the city 
should be left to take some care of itself. The care of the 
state cannot, we here see, be safely entrusted to maternal affec- 
tion, or to the domestic charities of high life. The great have 
private feelings of their own, to which the interests of humanity 



CORIOLANUS. 51 



and justice must courtesy. Their interests are so far from being 
the same as those of the community, that they are in direct and 
necessary opposition to them ; their power is at the expense of 
our weakness ; their riches, of our poverty ; their pride, of our 
degradation ; their splendor, of our wretchedness ; their tyranny, 
of our servitude. If they had the superior intelligence ascribed 
to them (which they have not) it would only render them so much 
more formidable ; and from gods would convert them into devils. 
The whole dramatic moral of Coriolanus is, that those who have 
little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all 
that others have left. The people are poor, therefore they 
ought to be starved. They are slaves, therefore they ought to be 
beaten. They work hard, therefore they ought to be treated like 
beasts of burden. They are ignorant, therefore they ought not 
to be allowed to feel that they want food, or clothing, or rest ; 
that they are enslaved, oppressed, and miserable. This is the 
logic of the imagination and the passions ; which seek to ag- 
grandize what excites admiration, and to heap contempt on mise- 
ry ; to raise power into tyranny, and to make tyranny absolute ; 
to thrust down that which is low still lower, and to make wretches 
desperate : to exalt magistrates into kings, kings into gods ; to 
degrade subjects to the rank of slaves, and slaves to the condition 
of brutes. The history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tra- 
gedy constructed upon the principles of poetical justice ; it is a 
noble or royal hunt, in which what is sport to the few, is death 
to the many, and in which the spectators halloo and encourage 
the strong to set upon the weak, and cry havoc in the chase, 
though they do not share in the spoil. We may depend upon it 
that what men delight to read in books, they will put in practice 
in reality. 

One of the most natural traits in this play is the difference of 
the interest taken in the success of Coriolanus by his wife and 
mother. The one is only anxious for his honor ; the other is 
fearful for his life. 

" VoLiTMNiA. Methinks I hither hear your husband's drum: 
I see him pluck Aufidius down by th' hair : 
Methinks I see him stamp thus — and call thus — 
Come on, ye cowards : ye were got in fear 



52 CORIOLANUS. 

Though you were born in Rome ; his bloody brow 

With his mail'd hand then wiping, forth he goes 

Like to a harvest man, that's task'd to mow 

Or all, or lose his hire. 

ViRGiLiA. His bloody brow ! Oh Jupiter, no blood. • 
VoLUMNiA. Away, you fool ; it more becomes a man 

Than gilt his trophy. The breast of Hecuba, 

When she did suckle Hector, look'd not lovelier 

Than Hector's forehead, when it spit forth blood 

At Grecian swords contending." 

When she hears the trumpets that proclaim her son's return, 
she says in the true spirit of a Roman matron, 

" These are the ushers of Martius : before him 
He carries noise, and behind him he leaves tears. 
Death, that dark spirit, in 's nervy arm doth lie, 
Which being advanc'd, declines, and then men die," 

Coriolanus himself is a complete character : his love of reputa- 
tion, his contempt of popular opinion, his pride and modesty, are 
consequences of each other. His pride consists in the inflexible 
sternness of his will : his love of glory is a determined desire to 
bear down all opposition, and to extort the admiration both of 
friends and foes. His contempt for popular favor, his unwilling- 
ness to hear his own praises, spring from the same source. He 
cannot contradict the praises that are bestowed upon him ; there- 
fore he is impatient at hearing them. He would enforce the good 
opinion of others by his actions, but does not want their ac- 
knowledgments in words. 

" Pray now, no more : my mother, 
Who has a charter to extol her blood. 
When she does praise me, grieves me." 

His magnanimity is of the same kind. He admires in an 
enemy that courage which he honors in himself: he places him- 
self on the hearth of Aufidius with the same confidence that he 
would have met him in the field, and feels that by putting him- 
self in his power, he takes from him all temptation for using it 
against him. 



CORIOLANUS. 53 



In the title-page of Coriolanus, it is said at the bottom of the 
Dramatis Personse, " The whole history exactly followed, and 
many of the principal speeches copied from the life of Coriolanus 
in Plutarch." It will be interesting to our readers to see how 
far this is the case. Two of the principal scenes, those between 
Coriolanus and Aufidius and between Coriolanus and his mother, 
are thus given in Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch, 
dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, 1759. The first is as follows : 

" It was even twilight when he entered the city of Antium, and many peo- 
ple met him in the streets, but no man knew him. So he went directly to 
Tullus Aufidius' house, and when he came thither, he got him up straight 
to the chimney-hearth, and sat him down, and spake not a word to any man, 
his face all muffled over. They of the house spying him, wondered what he 
should be, and yet they durst not bid him rise. For ill-favoredly muffled 
and disguised as he was, yet there appeared a certain majesty in his counte- 
.nance and in his silence : whereupon they went to Tullus, who was at sup- 
per, to tell of the strange disguising of this man. Tullus rose presently 
from the board, and coming towards him, asked him what he was, and 
wherefore he came. Then Martins unmuffled himself, and after he had 
paused awhile, making no answer, he said unto himself. If thou knowest 
me not yet, Tullus, and seeing me, dost not perhaps believe me to be the 
man I am indeed, I must of necessity discover myself to be that I am. ' I 
am Caius Martins, who hath done to thyself particularly, and to all the Vol- 
sces generally, great hurt and mischief, which I cannot deny for my sur- 
name of Coriolanus that I bear. For I never had other benefit nor recom- 
pense of the true and painful service I have done, and the extreme dan- 
gers I have been in, but this only surname : a good memory and witness of 
the malice and displeasure thou shouldest bear me. Indeed the name only 
remaineth with me ; for the rest, the envy and cruelty of the people of 
Rome have taken from me, by the sufferance of the dastardly nobility and 
magistrates, who have forsaken me, and let me be banished by the people. 
This extremity hath now driven me to come as a poor suitor, to take thy 
chimney-hearth, not of any hope I have to save my life thereby. For if I 
had feared death, I would not have come hither to put myself in hazard : 
but pricked forward with desire to be revenged of them that thus have ban- 
ished me, which now I do begin, by putting my person into the hands of their 
enemies. Wherefore, if thou hast any heart to be wreked of the injuries 
thy enemies have done thee, speed thee now, and let my misery serve thy 
turn, and so use it as my service may be a benefit to the Volsces : promising 
thee, that I will fight with better good will for all you, than I did when I 
was against you, knowing that they fight more valiantly who know the force 
of the enemy, than such as have never proved it. And if it be so that thou 
dare not, and that thou art weary to prove fortune any more, then am I also 



64 CORIOLANUS. 



weary to live any longer. And it were no wisdom in thee to save the life 
of him who hath been heretofore thy mortal enemy, and whose service now 
can nothing help, nor pleasure thee.' Tullus hearing what he said, was a 
marvellous glad man, and taking him by the hand, he said unto him : 
• Stand up, Martius, and be of good cheer, for in proffering thyself unto 
na, thou doest us great honor : and by this means thou mayest hope also 
of greater things at all the Volsces' hands.' So he feasted him for that time, 
and entertained him in the honorablest manner he could, talking with him 
of no other matter at that present : but within few days after, they fell to 
consultation together in what sort they should begin their wars." 

The meeting between Coriolanus and his mother is also nearly 
the same as in the play. 

" Now was Martius set there in the chair of state, with all the honors of 
a general, and when he spied the women coming afar off, he marvelled 
what the matter meant : but afterwards knowing his wife which came fore- 
most, he determined at the first to persist in his obstinate and inflexible 
rancor. But overcome in the end with natural affection, and being alto- 
gether altered to see them, his heart would not serve him 1o tarry their 
coming to his chair, but coming down in haste, he went to meet them, and 
first he kissed his mother, and embraced her a pretty while, then his wife 
and little children. And nature so wrought with him, that the tears fell 
from his eyes, and he could not keep himself from making much of them, 
but yielded to the affection of his blood, as if he had been violently carried 
with the fury of a most swift-running stream. After he had thus lovingly 
received them, and perceiving that his mother Volumnia would begin to 
speak to him, he called the chiefest of the council of the Volsces to hear 
what she would say. Then she spake in this sort : *^If we held our peace, 
my son, and determined not to speak, the state of our poor bodies, and pre- 
sent sight of our raiment, would easily betray to thee what life we have led 
at home, since thy exile and abode abroad ; but think now with thyself, how 
much more unfortunate than all the women living, we are come hither, 
considering that the sight which should be most pleasant to all others to 
behold, spiteful fortune had made most fearful to us : making myself to see 
my son, and my daughter here her husband, besieging the walls of his na- 
tive country : so as that which is the only comfort to all others, in their 
adversity and misery, to pray unto the Gods, and to call to them for aid, is 
the only thing which plungeth us into most deep perplexity. For w^e can- 
not, alas, together pray, both for victory to our country, and for safety of thy 
life also : but a world of grievous curses, yea, more than zny mortal enemy 
can heap upon us, are forcibly wrapped up in our prayers For the bitter 
sop of most hard choice is offered thy wife and children, to forego one of 
the two : either to lose the person of thyself, or the nurse of their native 
country. For myself, my son, T am determined not to tarry till fortune in 



CORIOLANUS. 55 



my lifetime do make an end of this war. For if I cannot persuade thee 
rather to do good unto both parties, than to overthrow and destroy the one, 
preferring love and nature before the malice and calamity of wars, thou 
shalt see, my son, and trust unto it, thou shalt no sooner march forward to 
assault thy country, but thy foot shall tread upon thy mother's womb, that 
brought thee first into this world, for I may not defer to see the day, either 
that my son be led prisoner in triumph by his natural countrymen, or that 
he himself do triumph of them, and of his natural country. For if it 
were so, that my request tended to save thy country, in destroying the 
Volsces, I must confess thou wouldest hardly and doubtfully resolve on 
that. For as to destroy thy natural country, it is altogether unmeet and 
unlawful, so were it not just and less honorable to betray those that put 
their trust in thee. But my only demand consisteth, to make a gaol delivery 
of all evils, which delivereth equal benefit and safety, both to the one and 
the other, but most honorable for the Volsces. For it shall appear, that 
having victory in their hands, they have of special favor granted us singular 
graces, peace and amity, albeit themselves have no less part of both than 
we. Of which good, if so it came to pass, thyself is the only author, and 
so hast thou the only honor. But if it fail, and fall out contrary, thyself 
alone deservedly shall carry the shameful reproach and burthen of either 
party. So, though the end of war be uncertain, yet this, notwithstanding, 
is most certain, that if it be thy chance to conquer, this benefit shalt thou 
reap of thy goodly conquest, to be chronicled the plague and destroyer of 
thy country. And if fortune overthrow thee, then the world will say, that 
through desire to revenge thy private injuries, thou hast for ever undone 
thy good friends, who did most lovingly and courteously receive thee.' 
Martins gave good ear unto his mother's words, without interrupting her 
speech at all, and after she had said what she would, he held his peace a 
pretty w^hile, and answered not a word. Hereupon she began again to speak 
unto him, and said : ' My son, why dost thou not answer me ? Dost thou 
think it good altogether to give place unto thy cholsr and desire of revenge, 
and thinkest thou it not honesty for thee to grant thy mother's request in so 
weighty a cause ? Dost thou take it honorable for a nobleman, to remember 
the wrongs and injuries done him, and dost not in like case think it an 
honest nobleman's part to be thankful for the goodness that parents do show 
to their children, acknowledging the duty and reverence they ought to bear 
unto them ? No man living is more bound to show himself thankful in all 
parts and respects than thyself; who so universally showest all ingratitude. 
Moreover, my son, thou hast sorely taken of thy country, exacting grievous 
payments upon them, in revenge of the injuries offered thee; besides, thou 
hast not hitherto showed thy poor mother any courtesy. And therefore it 
is not only honest, but due unto me, that without compulsion I should ob- 
tain my so just and reasonable request of thee. But since by reason I can- 
not persuade thee to it, to what purpose do I defer my last hope ?' And 
with these words herself, his wife and children, fell down upon their knees 
before him : Martius seeing that, could refrain no longer, but went straight 



5G CORIOLANUS. 



and lifted her up, crying out, ' Oh mother, what have you done to me ?' 
And holding her hard by the right hand, ' Oh mother,' said he, ' you have 
won a happy victory for your country, but mortal and unhappy for your 
son : for I see myself vanquished by you alone.' These words being spoken 
openly, he spake a little apart with his mother and wife, and then let them 
return again to Kome, for so they did request him ; and so remaining in the 
camp that night, the next morning he dislodged, and marched homeward 
Unto the Volsces' country again." 

Shakspeare has, in giving a dramatic form to this passage, 
adhered very closely and properly to the text. He did not think 
it necessary to improve upon the truth of nature. Several of 
the scenes in Julius Ccesar, particularly Portia's appeal to the 
confidence of her husband by showing him the wound she had 
given herself, and the appearance of the ghost of Caesar to Bru- 
tus, are, in like manner, taken from the history. 



TEOILUS AND CRESSIDA. 57 



TROIIUS AND CRESSIDA, 



This is one of the most loose and desultory of* our author's 
plays : it rambles on just as it happens, but it overtakes, together 
with some indifferent matter, a prodigious number of fine things 
in its way. Troilus himself is no character : he is merely a 
common lover ; but Cressida and her uncle Pandarus are hit off 
with proverbial truth. By the speeches given to the leaders of 
the Grecian host, Nestor, Ulysses, Agamemnon, Achilles, Shak- 
speare seems to have known them as well as if he had been a 
spy sent by the Trojans into the enemy's camp — to say nothing 
of their being very lofty examples of didactic eloquence. The 
speech, for instance, commencing, 

" Troy, yet upon her basis, had been down," &c. 

is very stately and spirited declamation. 

It cannot be said of Shakspeare, as was said of some one, that 
he was " without o'erfiowing full." He was full, even to o'er- 
flowing. He gave heaped measure, running over. This was 
his greatest fault. He was only in danger " of losing distinc- 
tion in his thoughts" (to borrow his own expression) 

" As doth a battle when they charge on heaps 
The enemy flying." 

There is another passage, the speech of Ulysses to Achilles, 
showing him the thankless nature of popularity, which has a 
still greater depth of moral observation and richness of illustra- 
tion than the former. It is long, but worth the quoting. The 



58 TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. 

sometimes giving an entire extract from the unacted plays of 
our author may with one class of readers have almost the use 
of restoring a lost passage : and may serve to convince another 
class of critics, that the poet's genius was not confined to the 
production of stage effect by preternatural means. 

" Ulysses. Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back. 
Wherein he puts alms for Oblivion; 
A great-siz'd monster of ingratitudes : 
Those scraps are good deeds past, 
Which are devour'd as fast as they are made, 
Forgot as soon as done : Persev'rance, dear my lord, 
Keeps Honor bright : to have done, is to hang 
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail 
In monumental mockery. Take the instant way ; 
For Honor travels in a strait so narrow. 
Where one but goes abreast ; keep then the path. 
For Emulation hath a thousand sons. 
That one by one pursue ; if you give vi^ay, 
Or hedge aside from the direct forth-right, 
Like to an entered tide, they all rush by, 

And leave you hindmost ; 

Or, like a gallant horse fall'n in first rank, 

O'er-run and trampled on : then w^hat do they in present 

Tho' less than yours in past, must o'ertop yours ; 

For time is like a fashionable host, 

That slightly shakes his parting guest by th' hand, 

And with his arms out-stretched, as he would fly, 

Grasps in the comer : the Welcome ever smiles. 

And P^arevvell goes out sighing. 0, let not virtue seek 

Remuneration for the thing it was ; for beauty, wit. 

High birth, vigor of bone, desert in service, 

Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all 

To envious and calumniating time : 

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin. 

That all, with one consent, praise new-born gauds, 

Tho' they are made and moulded of things past. 

The present eye praises the present object. 

Then marvel not, thou great and complete man, 

That all the Greeks begin to worship Ajax ; 

Since things in motion sooner catch the eye. 

Than what not stirs. The cry went out on thee, 

And still it might, and yet it may again. 

If thou would'st not entomb thyself alive, 

And case thy reputation in thy tent," 



TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. 59 

The throng of images in the above lines is prodigious ; and 
though they sometimes jostle against one another, they every- 
where raise and carry on the feeling, which is metaphysically 
true and profound. The debates between the Trojan chiefs on 
the restoring of Helen are full of knowledge of human motives 
and character. Troilus enters well into the philosophy of war, 
when he says, in answer to something that falls from Hector — 

" Why there you touch'd the life of our design : 

Were it not glory that we more affected, 

Than the performance of our heaving spleens, 

I would not wish a drop of Trojan blood 

Spent more in her defence. But, worthy Hector, 

She is a theme of honor and renown, 

A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds." 

The character of Hector, in the few slight indications which 
appear of it, is made very amiable. His death is sublime, and 
shows in a striking light the mixture of barbarity and heroism of 
the age. The threats of Achilles are fatal ; they carry their 
own means of execution with them. 

" Come here about me, you my myrmidons, 
Mark what I say. — Attend me where I wheel : 
Strike not a stroke, but keep yourselves in breath ; 
And when I have the bloody Hector found. 
Empale him with your weapons round about : 
In fellest manner execute your arms. 
Follow me, sirs, and my proceedings eye." 

He then finds Hector and slays him, as if he had been hunt- 
ing down a wild beast. There is something revolting as well as 
terrific in the ferocious coolness with which he singles out his 
prey : nor does the splendor of the achievement reconcile us to 
the cruelty of the means. 

The characters of Cressida and Pandarus are very amusing 
and instructive. The disinterested willingness of Pandarus to 
serve his friend in an affair which lies next his heart is immedi- 
ately brought forward. " Go thy way, Troilus, go thy way ; 
had I a sister were a grace, or a daughter were a goddess, he 
should take his choice. O admirable man ! Paris, Paris is dirt 



60 TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. 

to him, and I warrant Helen, to change, would give money to 
boot." This is the language he addresses to his niece : nor is 
she much behind-hand in coming into the plot. Her head is as 
light and fluttering as her heart. " It is the prettiest villain, she 
fetches her breath so short as a new-ta'en-sparrow." Both cha- 
racters are originals, and quite different from what they are in 
Chaucer. In Chaucer, Cressida is represented as a grave, sober, 
considerate personage (a widow — he cannot tell her age, nor 
whether she has children or no), who has an alternate eye to her 
character, her interest, and her pleasure. Shakspeare's Cres- 
sida is a giddy girl, an unpractised jilt, who falls in love with 
Troilus, as she afterwards deserts him, from mere levity and 
thoughtlessness of temper. She may be wooed and won to any- 
thing and from anything, at a moment's warning : the other 
knows very well what she would be at, and sticks to it, and is 
more governed by substantial reasons than by caprice or vanity. 
Pandarus again, in Chaucer's story, is a friendly sort of go- 
between, tolerably busy, officious, and forward in bringing mat- 
ters to bear ; but in Shakspeare he has " a stamp exclusive and 
professional :" he wears the badge of his trade ; he is a regular 
knight of the game. The difference of the manner in which the 
subject is treated arises perhaps less from intention, than from 
the different genius of the two poets. There is no double en- 
tendre in the characters of Chaucer : they are either quite seri- 
ous or quite comic. In Shakspeare the ludicrous and ironical 
are constantly blended with the stately and the impassioned. 
We see Chaucer's characters as they saw themselves, not as 
they appeared to others or might have appeared to the poet. He 
is as deeply implicated in the affairs of his personages as they 
could be themselves. He had to go a long journey with each 
of them, and became a kind of necessary confidant. There is 
little relief, or light and shade, in his pictures. The conscious 
smile is not seen lurking under the brow of grief or impatience. 
Everything with him is intense and continuous — a working out 
of what went before. Shakspeare never committed himself to 
his characters. He trifled, laughed, or wept with them as he 
chose. He has no prejudices for or against them; and it seems 
a matter of perfect indifference whether he shall be in jest or 



TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. 61 

earnest. According to him, " the web of our lives is of a mingled 
yarn, good and ill together." His genius was dramatic, as Chau- 
cer's was historical. He saw both sides of a question, the dif- 
ferent views taken of it according to the different interests of 
the parties concerned, and he was at once an actor and spectator 
in the scene. If anything, he is too various and flexible ; too 
full of transitions, of glancing lights, of salient points. If Chau- 
cer followed up his subject too doggedly, perhaps Shakspeare 
was too volatile and heedless. The Muse's wing too often lifted 
him off his feet. He made infinite excursions to the right and 
the left. 

" He hath done 



Mad and fantastic execution, 
Engaging and redeeming of himself 
With such a careless force and forceless care, 
As if that luck, in very spite of cunning, 
Bad him win all." 

Chaucer attended chiefly to the real and natural, that is, to the 
involuntary and inevitable impressions on the mind in given cir- 
cumstances. Shakspeare exhibited also the possible and the fan- 
tastical, — not only what things are in themselves, but whatever 
they might seem to be, their different reflections, their endless 
combinations. He lent his fancy, wit, invention, to others, and 
borrowed their feelings in return. Chaucer excelled in the force 
of habitual sentiment ; Shakspeare added to it every variety of 
passion, every suggestion of thought or accident. Chaucer de- 
scribed external objects with the eye of a painter, or he might 
be said to have embodied them with the hand of a sculptor, 
every part is so thoroughly made out, and tangible : — Shak- 
speare's imagination threw over them a lustre 

— " Prouder than when blue Iris bends." 

Everything in Chaucer has a downright reality. A simile or 
a sentiment is as if it were given in upon evidence. In Shak- 
speare the commonest matter-of-fact has a romantic grace about 
it ; or seems to float with the breath of imagination in a freer 
element. No one could have more depth of feeling or observa- 



62 TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. 

tion than Chaucer, but he wanted resources of invention to lay 
open the stores of nature or the human heart with the same radi- 
ant light that Shakspeare has done. However fine or profound 
the thought, we know what was coming, whereas the effect of 
reading Shakspeare is " like the eye of vassalage encountering 
majesty." Chaucer's mind was consecutive, rather than dis- 
cursive. He arrived at truth through a certain process ; Shak- 
speare saw everything by intuition. Chaucer had great variety 
of power, but he could do only one thing at once. He set him- 
self to work on a particular subject. His ideas were kept sepa- 
rate, labelled, ticketed and parcelled out in a set form, in pews 
and compartments by themselves. They did not play into one 
another's hands. They did not re-act upon one another, as the 
blower's breath moulds the yielding glass. There is something 
hard and dry in them. What is the most wonderful thing in 
Shakspeare's faculties is their excessive sociability, and how they 
gossiped and compared notes together. 

We must conclude this criticism ; and we will do it with a 
quotation or two. One of the most beautiful passages in Chau- 
cer's tale is the description of Cresseide's first avowal of her 
love. 

" And as the new abashed nightingale, 
That sthiteth first when she beginneth sing, 
When that she heareth any herde's tale. 
Or in the hedges any wight stirring. 
And, after, sicker doth her voice outring; 
Right so Cresseide, when that her dread stent, 
Opened her heart, and told him her intent," 

See also the two next stanzas, and particularly that divine 
one beginning 

" Her armes small, her back both straight and soft," &c. 

Compare this with the following speech of Troilus to Cressida 
in the play. 

" 0, that I thought it could be in a woman ; 
And if it can, I will presume in you. 



TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. , 6.3 



To feed for aye her lamp and flame of love, 

To keep her constancy in plight and youth, 

Out-living beauties out-ward, with a mind 

That doth renew swifter than blood decays. 

Or, that persuasion could but thus convince me. 

That my integrity and truth to you 

Might be affronted with the match and weight 

Of such a winnow'd purity in love ; 

How were I then uplifted ! But alas, 

I am as true as Truth's simplicity. 

And simpler than the infancy of Truth." 

These passages may not seem very characteristic at first sight, 
though we think they are so. We will give two, that cannot be 
mistaken, Patroclus says to Achilles, 

" Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid 



Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold, 
And like a dew-drop from the lion's mane 
Be shook to air." 

Troilus, addressing the god of day on the approach of the 
morning that parts him from Cressida, says with much scorn, 

" What ! proffer'st thou thy light here for to sell ? 
Go, sell it them that smalle seles grave." 

If nobody but Shakspeare could have written the former, 
nobody but Chaucer would have thought of the latter. Chaucer 
was the most literal of poets, as Richardson was of prose writers. 



64 ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA. 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATEA. 



This is a very noble play. Though not in the first order of 
Shakspeare's productions, it stands next to them, and is, we think, 
the finest of his historical plays, that is, of those in which he 
made poetry the organ of history, and assumed a certain tone of 
character and sentiment, in conformity to known facts, instead of 
trusting to his observations of general nature, or to the unlimited 
indulgence of his own fancy. What he has added to the history 
is upon an equality with it. His genius was, as it were, a match 
for history as well as nature, and could grapple at will with 
either. This play is full of that pervading comprehensive power 
by which the poet always seems to identify himself with time 
and circumstances. It presents a fine picture of Roman pride 
and Eastern magnificence : and in the struggle between the two, 
the empire of the world seems suspended, " like the swan's 
down-feather, 

" That stands upon the swell at full of tide, 
And neither way inclines." 

The characters breathe, move, and live. Shakspeare does 
not stand reasoning on what his characters would do or say, 
but at once becomes them, and speaks and acts for them. He 
does not present us with groups of stage puppets or poetical 
machines making set speeches on human life, and acting from a 
calculation of ostensible motives, but he brings living men and 
women on the scene, who speak and act from real feelings, ac- 
cording to the ebbs and flows of passion, without the least tinc- 
ture of the pedantry of logic or rhetoric. Nothing is made out 
by inference and analogy, by climax and antithesis, but every- 
thing takes place just as it would have done in reality, according 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA. 65 

to the occasion. The character of Cleopatra is a master-piece. 
What an extreme contrast it affords to Imogen ! One would 
think it almost impossible for the same person to have drawn 
both. The Egyptian is voluptuous, ostentatious, conscious, 
boastful of her charms, haughty, tyrannical, fickle. Her luxu- 
rious pomp and gorgeous extravagance are displayed in all 
their force and lustre, as well as the irregular grandeur of the 
soul of Mark Antony. Take only the first four lines that they 
speak as an example of the regal style of love-making. 

" Cleopatra. If it be love indeed, tell me how much .' 
Ajvtony. There's beggary in the love that can be reckon'd. 
Cleopatra. I'll set a bourn how far to be belov'd. 
Antony. Then must thou needs find out new heav'n, new earth." 

The rich and poetical description of her person, beginning — 

" The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, 
Burnt on the water ; the poop was beaten gold, 
Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that 
The winds were love-sick" — 

seems to prepare the way, for, and almost to justify the subse- 
quent infatuation of Antony when, in the sea-fight at Actium, he 
leaves the battle, and " like a doating mallard " follows her fly- 
ing sails. 

Few things in Shakspeare (and we know of nothing in any 
other author like them) have more of that local truth of imagi- 
nation and character than the passage in which Cleopatra is 
represented conjecturing what were the employments of Antony 
in his absence. •' He's speaking now, or murmuring — Whereas 
my serpent of old Nile V Or again, when she says to Antony, 
after the defeat at Actium, and his summoning up resolution to 
risk another fight — " It is my birth-day ; I had thought to have 
held it poor ; but since my lord is Antony again, I will be Cleo- 
patra." Perhaps the finest burst of all is Antony's rage after 
his final defeat, when he comes in, and surprises the messenger 
of Coesar kissing her hand — 

" To let a fellow that will take rewards, 
And say, God quit you, be familiar with, 
6 



66 ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA. 



My play-fellow, your hand ; this kingly seal, 
And plighter of high hearts," 

It is no wonder that he orders him to be whipped ; but his low 
condition is not the true reason : there is another feeling which 
lies deeper, though Antony's pride would not let him show it, 
except by his rage ; he suspects the fellow to be Caesar's proxy. 
Cleopatra's whole character is the triumph of the voluptuous, 
of the love of pleasure and the power of giving it, over every 
other consideration. Octavia is a dull foil to her, and Fulvia, a 
shrill-tongued shrew. What a picture do those lines give of 
her — 

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale 
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy 
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry 
Where most she satisfies." 

What a spirit and fire in her conversation with Antony's mes- 
senger, who brings her the unwelcome news of his marriage 
with Octavia ! How all the pride and beauty of high rank 
breaks out in her promised reward to him — 

" There's gold, and here 

My bluest veins to kiss !" 

She had great and unpardonable faults, but the beauty of her 
death almost redeems them. She learns from the depth of de- 
spair the strength of her affections. She keeps her queen-like 
state in the last disgrace, and her sense of the pleasurable in the 
last moments of her life. She tastes a luxury in death. After 
applying the asp, she says with fondness — 



" Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, 
That sucks the nurse asleep .' 
As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle. 
Oh Antony !" 

It is worth while to observe that Shakspeare has contrasted 
the extreme magnificence of the descriptions in this play with 
pictures of extreme suffering and physical horror, not less strik- 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA. 67 

ing — partly, perhaps, to excuse the effeminacy of Mark Antony, 
to whom they are related as having happened, but more to pre- 
serve a certain balance of feeling in the mind. Ctesar says, 
hearing of his conduct at the court of Cleopatra, 



-" Antony, 



Leave thy lascivious wassels. When thou once 

Wert beaten from Mutina, where thou slew'st 

Hirtius and Pansa, consuls, at thy heel 

Did famine follow, whom thou fought'st against, 

Though daintily brought up, with patience more 

Than savages could suffer. Thou did'st drink 

The stale of horses, and the gilded puddle 

Which beast would cough at. Thy palate then did deign 

The roughest berry on the rudest hedge. 

Yea, like the stag, when snow the pasture sheets, 

The barks of trees thou browsed'st. On the Alps, 

It is reported, thou did'st eat strange flesh, 

Which some did die to look on : and all this, 

It wounds thine honor that I speak it now, 

Was borne so like a soldier, that thy cheek 

So much as lank'd not," 

The passage after Antony's defeat by Augustus, where he is 
made to say — 

" Yes, yes ; he at Philippi kept 
His sword e'en like a dancer ; while I struck 
The lean and wrinkled Cassius, and 'twas I 
That the mad Brutus ended " — 

is one of those fine retrospections which show us the winding 
and eventful march of human life. The jealous attention which 
has been paid to the unities both of time and place, has taken 
away the principle of perspective in the drama, and all the in- 
terest which objects derive from distance, from contrast, from 
privation, from change of fortune, from long-cherished passion ; 
and contracts our view of life from a strange and romantic dream, 
long, obscure, and infinite, into a smartly contested three hours' 
inaugural disputation on its merits by the different candidates for 
theatrical applause. 
The latter scenes of Antony and Cleopatra are full of the 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA. 



changes of accident and passion. Success and defeat follow one 
another with startling rapidity. Fortune sits upon her wheel 
more blind and giddy than usual. This precarious state and 
the approaching dissolution of his greatness are strikingly dis- 
played in the dialogue between Antony and Eros. 

" Antoxy. Eros, thou yet behold'st me ? 

Eros. Ay, noble lord. 

Antony. Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish, 
A vapor sometime, like a bear or lion, 
A towered citadel, a pendant rock, 
A forked mountain, or blue promontory 
With trees upon 't, that nod unto the world 
And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs, 
They are black vesper's pageants. 

Eros. Ay, my lord. 

Antony. That which is now a horse, even with a thought 
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct 
As water is in water. 

Eros, It does, my lord, 

Antony, My good knave, Eros, now thy captain i.s 
Even such a body," &c. 

This is, without doubt, one of the finest pieces of poetry in 
Shakspeare. The splendor of the imagery, the semblance of 
reality, the lofty range of picturesque objects hanging over the 
world, their evanescent nature, the total uncertainty of what is 
left behind, are just like the mouldering schemes of human great- 
ness. It is finer than Cleopatra's passionate lamentation over 
his fallen grandeur, because it is more dim, unstable, unsubstan- 
tial. Antony's headstrong presumption, and infatuated deter- 
mination to yield to Cleopatra's wishes to fight by sea instead of 
land, meet a merited punishment ; and the extravagance of his 
resolutions, increasing with the desperateness of his circumstan- 
ces, is well commented upon by (Enobarbus. 

—— " I see men's judgments are 

A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward 
Do draw the inward quality after them 
To suffer all alike." 

The repentance of (Enobarbus after his treachery to his mas- 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA. 09 

ter is the most affecting part of the play. He cannot recover 
from the blow which Antony's generosity gives him, and he dies 
broken-hearted, "a master-leaver and a fugitive." 

Shakspeare's genius has spread over the whole play a richness 
like the overflowing of the Nile. 



» HAMLET. 



HAMLET 



This is that Hamlet the Dane, whom we read of in our youth, 
and whom we seem almost to remember in our after-years ; he 
who made that famous soliloquy on life, who gave the advice to 
the players, who thought " this goodly frame, the earth, a steril 
promontory, and this brave o'er-hanging firmament, the air, this 
majestical roof fretted with golden fire, a foul and pestilent con- 
gregation of vapors;" whom " man delighted not, nor woman 
neither ;" he who talked with the grave-diggers, and moralised 
on Yorick's skull ; the school-fellow of Rosencrantz and Guil- 
denstern at Wittenberg ; the friend of Horatio ; the lover of 
Ophelia ; he that was mad and sent to England ; the slow 
avenger of his father's death ; who lived at the court of Hor- 
wendillus five hundred years before we were born, but all whose 
thoughts we seem to know as well as we do our own, because 
we have read them in Shakspeare. 

Hamlet is a name : his speeches and sayings but the idle 
coinage of the poet's brain. What then, are they not real ? 
They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the 
reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet. This play has a 
prophetic truth, which is above that of history. Whoever has 
become thoughtful and melancholy through his own mishaps or 
those of others ; whoever has borne about with him the clouded 
brow of reflection, and thought himself "too much i' th' sun;" 
whoever has seen the golden lamp of day dimmed by envious 
mists rising in his own breast, and could find in the world be- 
fore him only a dull blank with nothing left remarkable in it ; 
whoever has known " the pangs of despised love, the insolence 
of office, or the spurns which patient merit of the unworthy 



HAMLET. 71 



takes;" he who has felt his mind sink within him, and sadness 
cling to his heart like a malady, who has had his hopes blighted 
and his youth staggered by the apparitions of strange things; 
who cannot be well at ease, while he sees evil hovering near 
him like a spectre ; whose powers of action have been eaten up 
by thought ; he to whom the universe seems infinite, and him- 
self nothing ; whose bitterness of soul makes him careless of 
consequences, and who goes to a play as his best resource to 
drive off, to a second remove, the evils of life by a mock repre- 
sentation of them — this is the true Hamlet. 

We have been so used to this tragedy that we hardly know 
how to criticise it any more than we should know how to de- 
scribe our own faces. }3ut we must make such observations as 
we can. It is the one of Shakspeare's plays that we think of 
oftenest, because it abounds most in striking reflections on hu- 
man life, and because the distresses of Hamlet are transferred, 
by the turn of his mind, to the general account of humanity. 
Whatever happens to him, we apply to ourselves, because he 
applies it so himself as a means of general reasoning. He is a 
great moraliser; and what makes him worth attending to is, 
that he moralises on his own feelings and experience. He is 
not a common-place pedant. If Lear shows the greatest depth 
of passion, Hamlet is the most remarkable for the ingenuity, 
originality, and unstudied development of character. Shak- 
speare had more of the magnanimity of genius than any other 
poet, and he has shown more of it in this play than in any other. 
There is no attempt to force an interest : everything is left to 
time and circumstances. The attention is excited without pre- 
meditation or effort, the incidents succeed each other as matters 
of course, the characters think and speak and act just as they 
would do if left entirely to themselves. There is no set pur- 
pose, no straining at a point. The observations are suggested 
by the passing scene — the gusts of passion come and go like 
sounds of music borne on the wind. The whole play is an 
exact transcript of what might be supposed to have taken place 
at the court of Denmark, at the remote period of time fixed 
upon, before the modern refinements in morals and manners 
were heard of. It would have been interesting enough to have 



72 HAMLET. 



been admitted as a bystander in such a scene, at such a time, 
to have heard and seen something of what was going on. But 
here we are more than spectators. We have not only " the out- 
ward pageants and the signs of grief;" " but we have that 
within which passes show." We read the thoughts of the heart, 
we catch the passions living as they rise. Other dramatic wrk'- 
ers give us very fine versions and paraphrases of nature : but 
Shakspeare, together with his own comments, gives us the ori- 
ginal text, that we may judge for ourselves. Here, as in all his 
other works, the poet appears for the time being to be identified 
with each character he wishes to represent, and to pass from 
one to ihe other like the same soul, successively animating dif- 
ferent bodies. By an art like that of the ventriloquist, he throws 
his imagination out of himself, and makes every word appear to 
proceed from the very mouth of the person whose name it bears. 
His plays alone are properly expressions of the passions, not 
descriptions of them. His characters are real beings of flesh 
and blood ; they speak like men, not like authors. Each object 
and circumstance seems to exist in his mind as it existed in 
nature ; each several train of thought and feeling goes on of 
itself without an effort or confusion ; in the world of his imagi- 
nation everything has a life, a place, and being of its own. 

The character of Hamlet is itself a pure effusion of genius. 
It is not a character marked by strength of passion or will, but 
by refinement of thought and feeling. Hamlet is as little of the 
hero as a man can well be : but he is a young and princely no- 
vice, full of high enthusiasm and quick sensibility — the sport of 
circumstances, questioning with fortune, and refining on his own 
feelings, and forced from the natural bias of his character by 
the strangeness of his situation. He seems incapable of delibe- 
rate action, and is only hurried into extremities on the spur of 
the occasion, when he has no time to reflect, as in the scene 
where he kills Polonius, and again, where he alters the letters 
which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are taking with them to 
England, purporting his death. At other times when he is most 
bound to act, he remains puzzled, undecided and sceptical, dal- 
lies with his purposes, till the occasion is lost, and always finds 
some pretence to relapse into indolence and thoughtfulness again. 



HAMLET. 73 



For this reason he refuses to kill the King when he is at his 
prayers, and by a refinement in malice, which is in truth only 
an excuse for his own want of resolution, defers his revenge to 
some more fatal opportunity, when its object shall be engaged 
in some act " that has no relish of salvation in it." 

He is the prince of philosophical speculators, and because he 
cannot have his revenge perfect, according to the most refined 
idea his wish can form, he misses it altogether. So he scruples 
to trust the suggestions of the Ghost, contrives the scene of the 
play to have surer proof of his uncle's guilt, and then rests sa- 
tisfied with this confirmation of his suspicions, and the success 
of his experiment, instead of acting upon it. Yet he is sensible 
of his own weakness, taxes himself with it, and tries to reason 
himself out of it. 

" How all occasions do inform against me, 
And spur my dull revenge ! What is a man, 
If his chief good and market of his time 
Be but to sleep and feed ? A beast ; no more, 
Sure he that made us with such large discourse. 
Looking before and after, gave us not 
That capability and god-like reason 
To rust in us unus'd : now whether it be 
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple 
Of thinking too precisely on th' event, — 
A thought which quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom, 
And ever three parts coward — I do not know 
Why yet I live to say, this thing's to do ; 
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means 
To do it. Examples gross as earth excite me : 
Witness this army of such mass and charge, 
Led by a delicate and tender prince, 
Whose spirit with divine ambition pufF'd, 
Makes mouths at the invisible event. 
Exposing vs^hat is mortal and unsure 
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare. 
Even for an egg-shell. 'Tis not to be great, 
Never to stir without great argument ; 
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw, 
When honor's at the stake. How stand I then, 
That have a father killed, a mother stain'd, 
Excitements of my reason and my blood. 
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see 



74 HAMLET. 



The imminent death of tw enty thousand men, 
That for a fantasy and trick of fame, 
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot 
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause, 
Which is not tomb enough and continent 
To hide the slain ? — 0, from this time forth, 
My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth." 

Still he does nothing : and this very speculation on his own in- 
firmity only affords him another occasion for indulging it. It is 
not for any want of attachment to his father or abhorrence of 
his murder that Hamlet is thus dilatory, but it is more to his taste 
to indulge his imagination in reflecting upon the enormity of the 
crime and refining on his schemes of vengeance, than to put 
them into immediate practice. His ruling passion is to think, 
not to act: and any vague pretence that flatters this propensity 
instantly diverts him from his previous purposes. 

The moral perfection of this character has been called in 
question by those, we think, who did not understand it. It is 
more natural than conformable to rules ; and if not more amia- 
ble, is certainly more dramatic on that account. Hamlet is not, 
to be sure, a Sir Charles Grandison. In general the ethical de- 
lineations of " that noble and liberal casuist" (as Shakspeare 
has been well called) do not exhibit the drab-colored quakerism 
of morality. His plays are not copied either from The Whole 
Duty of Man, or from The Academy of Compliments! We 
confess, we are a little shocked at the want of refinement 
in those who are shocked at the want of refinement in Ham- 
let. The deficiency of punctilious exactness in his beha- 
vior either partakes of the " licence of the time," or belongs to 
the very excess of intellectual refinement in the character, 
which makes the common rules of life, as well as his own 
purposes, sit loose upon him. He may be said to be amenable 
only to the tribunal of his own thoughts, and is too much occu- 
pied with the airy world of contemplation to lay as much stress 
as he ought on the practical consequences of things. His ha- 
bitual principles of action are unhinged and out of joint with 
the time. His conduct to Ophelia is quite natural in his circum- 
stances. It is that of assumed severity only. It is the effect 
of disappointed hope, of bitter regrets, of affection suspended, 



HAMLET. 75 



not obliterated, by the distractions of the scene around him ' 
Amidst the natural and preternatural horrors of his situation, 
he might be excused in delicacy from carrying on a regular 
courtship. When " his father's spirit was in arms," it was not 
a time for the son to make love in. He could neither marry 
Ophelia, nor wound her mind by explaining the cause of his 
alienation, which he durst hardly trust himself to think of. It 
would have taken him years to have come to a direct explana- 
tion on the point. In the harassed state of his mind, he could 
not have done otherwise than he did. His conduct does not con- 
tradict what he says when he sees her funeral — 

" I lov'd Ophelia : forty thousand brothers 
Could not with all their quantity of love 
Make up my sum." 

Nothing can be more affecting or beautiful than the Queen's 
apostrophe to Ophelia on throwing flowers into the grave : 



Sweets to the sweet, farewell. 



I hop'd thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife : 
I thought thy bride-bed to have deck'd, sweet maid, 
And not have strew'd thy grave." 

Shakspeare was thoroughly a master of the mixed motives of 
human character, and he here shows us the Queen, who was so 
criminal in some respects, not without sensibility and affection 
in other relations of life. — Ophelia is a character almost too ex- 
quisitely touching to be dwelt upon. Oh rose of May, oh flower 
too soon faded ! Her love, her death, are described with the truest 
touches of tenderness and pathos. It is a character which no- 
body but Shakspeare could have drawn in the way that he has 
done, and to the conception of which there is not even the small- 
est approach, except in some of the old romantic ballads. Her 
brother, Laertes, is a character we do not like so well : he is too 
hot and choleric, and somewhat rhodomontade. Polonius is a 
perfect character in its kind ; nor is there any foundation for the 
objections which have been made to the consistency of this part. 
It is said that he acts very foolishly and talks very sensibly. 
There is no inconsistency in that. Again, that he talks wisely 



76 HAMLET. 



at one time and foolishly at another ; that his advice to Laertes 
is very sensible, and his advice to the King and Queen on the 
subject of Hamlet's madness very ridiculous. But he gives the 
one as a father, and is sincere in it ; he gives the other as a mere 
courtier, a busy-body, and is accordingly officious, garrulous, and 
impertinent. In short, Shakspeare has been accused of incon- 
sistency in this and other characters, only because he has kept 
up the distinction which there is in nature, between the under- 
standings and the moral habits of men, between the absurdity of 
tiieir ideas and the absurdity of their motives. Polonius is not a 
fool, but he makes himself appear one. His folly, whether in 
his actions or speeches, comes under the head of impropriety of 
intention. 

Plamlet is probably, of all other of Shakspeare's characters, 
the most difficult to personate on the stage. It is like the attempt 
to embody a shadow. 

" Come then, the colors and the ground prepare, 
Dip in the rainbow, trick her off in air ! 
Chuse a firm cloud, before it falls, and in it 
Catch, ere she change, the Cynthia of a minute." 

Such, nearly, is the task which the actor imposes on himself 
in the part of Hamlet. It is quite remote from hardness and 
dry precision. The character is spun to the finest thread, yet 
never loses its continuity. It has the yielding flexibility of a 
wave of the sea ! It is made up of undulating lines, without a 
single sharp angle. There is no set purpose, no straining at a 
point. The observations are suggested by the passing scene — 
the gusts of passion come and go, like the sounds of music 
borne on the wind. The interest depends not on the action, but 
on the thoughts. 



THE TEMPEST. 77 



THE TEMPEST. 



There can bo little doubt that Shakspeare was the most uni- 
versal genius that ever lived. " Either for tragedy, comedy, 
history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical- pastoral, scene in- 
dividable or poem unlimited, he is the only man. Seneca can- 
not be too heavy, nor Plautus too light for him." He has not 
only the same absolute command over our laughter and our 
tears, all the resources of passion, of wit, of thought, of ob- 
servation, but he has the most unbounded range of fanciful in- 
vention, whether terrible or playful, the same insight into the 
world of imagination that he has into the world of reality ; and 
over all there presides the same truth of character and nature, 
and the same spirit of humanity. His ideal beings are as true 
and natural as his real characters ; that is, as consistent with 
themselves, for if we supposed such beings to exist at all, they 
could not act, speak, or feel otherwise than as he makes them. 
He has invented for them a language, manners, and sentiments 
of their own, from the tremendous imprecations of the witches 
in Macbeth, when they do " a deed without a name," to the 
sylph-like expressions of Ariel, who " does his spiriting gently ;" 
the mischievous tricks and gossipping of Robin Goodfellow, or 
the uncouth gabbling and emphatic gesticulations of Caliban in 
this play. 

The Tempest is one of the most original and perfect of Shak- 
speare's productions, and he has shown in it all the variety of 
his powers. It is full of grace and grandeur. The human 
and imaginary characters, the dramatic and the grotesque, are 
blended together with the greatest art and without any appear- 



78 THE TEMPEST. 



ance of it. Though he has here given " to airy nothing a local 
habitation and a name," yet that part which is only the fantastic 
creation of his mind, has the same palpable texture, and coheres 
*' semblably" with the rest. As the preternatural part has the 
air of reality, and almost haunts the imagination with a sense 
of truth, the real characters and events partake of the wildnes3 
of a dream. The stately magician, Prospero, driven from his 
dukedom, but around whom (so potent is his art) airy spirits 
throng numberless to do his bidding ; his daughter Miranda 
(''worthy of that name"), to whom all the power of his art 
points, and who seems the goddess of the isle ; the princely 
Ferdinand, cast by fate upon the haven of his happiness ; the de- 
licate Ariel ; the savage Caliban, half brute, half demon ; the 
drunken ship's crew — are all connected parts of the story, and 
could not be spared from the place they fill. Even the local 
scenery is of a piece and character with the subject. Pros- 
pero's enchanted island seems to have risen up out of the sea ; 
the airy music, the tempest-tost vessel, the turbulent waves, all 
have the effect of the landscape back-ground of some fine pic- 
ture. Shakspeare's pencil is (to use an allusion of his own) 
"like the dyer's hand, subdued to what it works in." Every- 
thing in him, though it partakes "of the liberty of wit," is also 
subjected to " the law " of the understanding. For instance, 
even the drunken sailors share, in the disorder of their minds 
and bodies, in the tumult of the elements, and seem on shore 
to be as much at the mercy of chance as they were before at 
the mercy of the winds and waves. These fellows, with their 
sea-wit, are the least to our taste of any part of the play : but 
they are as like drunken sailors as they can be, and are an in- 
direct foil to Caliban, whose figure acquires a classical dignity 
in the comparison. 

The character of Caliban is generally thought (and justly so) 
to be one of the author's masterpieces. It is not indeed plea- 
sant to see this character on the stage any more than it is to see 
the god Pan personated there. But in itself it is one of the 
wildest and most abstracted of all Shakspeare's characters ; 
whose deformity, whether of body or mind, is redeemed by the 
power and truth of the imagination displayed in it. It is the 



THE TEMPEST. 79 



essence of grossness, but there is not a particle of vulgarity in 
it. Shakspeare has described the brutal mind of Caliban in 
contact with the pure and original forms of nature ; the cha- 
racter grows out of the soil where it is rooted, uncontrolled, un- 
couth, and wild, uncramped by any of the meannesses of cus- 
tom. It is " of the earth, earthy.'' It seems almost to have 
been dug out of the ground, with a soul instinctively superadded 
to it, answering to its wants and origin. Vulgarity is not na- 
tural coarseness, but conventional coarseness, learnt from others, 
contrary to, or without an entire conformity of natural power 
and disposition ; as fashion is the common- pi ace affectation of 
what is elegant and refined without any feeling of the essence 
of it. Schlegel, the admirable German critic on Shakspeare, 
observes that Caliban is a poetical character, and '' always 
speaks in blank verse." He first comes in thus : — 

" Caliban. As wicked dew as e'er my mother brush'd 
With raven's feather from unwholesome fen, 
Drop on you both : a south-west blow on ye. 
And blister you all o'er ! 

Prospero. For this, be sure, to-night thou shalt have cramps, 
Side stitches that shall pen thy breath up ; urchins 
Shall for that vast of night that they may work, 
All exercise on thee : thou shalt be pinch'd 
As thick as honey-combs, each pinch more stinging 
Than bees that made 'em, 

Caliban. I must eat my dinner. 
This island's mine by Sycorax my mother, 
Which thou tak'st from me. When thou camest first, 
Thou strok'dst me, and mad'st much of me ; would'st give me 
Water with berries in 't ; and teach me how 
To name the bigger light and how the less 
That burn by day and night ; and then I loved thee. 
And show'd thee all the qualities o' th' isle, 
The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile : 
Curs'd be I that I did so ! Ail the charms 
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you ! 
For I am all the subjects that you have, 
Who first was mine own king ; and here you sty me 
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me 
The rest o' th' island." 



80 THE TEMPEST. 



And again, he promises Trinculo his services thus, if he will 
free him from his drudgery. 

" I'll show thee the best springs ; I'll pluck thee berries, 
I'll fish for thee, and get thee wood enough. 
I pr'ythee let me bring thee where crabs grow, 
And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts : 
Show thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee how 
To snare the nimble marmozet : I'll bring thee 
To clust'ring filberds ; and sometimes I'll get thee 
Young scamels from the rock." 

In conducting Stephano and Trinculo to Prospero's cell, Cali- 
ban shows the superiority of natural capacity over greater 
knowledge and greater folly ; and in a former scene, when 
Ariel frightens them with his music, Caliban to encourage 
tJiem accounts for it in the eloquent poetry of the senses. 

— " Be not afraid, the isle is full of noises. 

Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. 

Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments 

Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices. 

That if I then had waked after long sleep, 

Would make me sleep again ; and then in dreaming. 

The clouds methought would open, and show riches 

Ready to drop upon me : when I wak'd 

I cried to dream again." 

This is not more beautiful than it is true. The poet here 
siiows us the savage with the simplicity of a child, and makes 
the strange monster amiable. Shakspeare had to paint the 
human animal rude and without choice in its pleasures, but not 
without the sense of pleasure or some germ of the affections. 
Master Barnardine, in Measure for Pleasure, the savage of 
civilized life, is an admirable philosophical counterpart to Cali- 
ban. 

Shakspeare has, as it were by design, drawn off from Caliban 
the elements of whatever is ethereal and refined, to compound 
them in the unearthly mould of Ariel. Nothing was ever more 
finely conceived than this contrast between the material and the 
spiritual, the gross and delicate. Ariel is imaginary power, the 



THE TEMPEST. 



swiftness of thought personified. When told to make good speed 
by Prospero, he says, "I drink the air before me." This is 
something like Puck's boast on a similar occasion, " I'll put a 
girdle round about the earth in forty minutes." But Ariel dif. 
fers from Puck in having a fellow feeling in the interests of those 
he is employed about. How excellent is the following dialogue 
between him and Prospero ! 

" Ariel. Your charm so strongly works 'em, 
That if you now beheld them, your affections 
Would become tender. 

Prospero. Dost thou think so, spirit .' 

Ariel. Mine would, sir, were I human. 

Prospero. And mine shall. 
Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling 
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself, 
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply, 
Passion'd as they, be kindlier moved than thou art .' " 

It has been observed that there is a peculiar charm in the 
songs introduced in Shakspeare, which, without conveying any 
distinct images, seem to recall all the feelings connected with 
them, like snatches of half- forgotten music heard indistinctly 
at intervals. There is this effect produced by Ariel's songs, 
which seem to sound in the air, and as if the person playing 
them were invisible. We shall give one instance out of many 
of this general power. 

" Enter Ferdinand ; and Ariel invisible, playing and singing. 

Ariel's song. 

Come unto these yellow sands. 

And then take hands ; 

Curt'sied when you have, and kiss'd 

(The wild waves whist) ; 

Foot it featly here and there ; 

And sweet sprites the burden bear. 

[Burden dispersedly. 
Hark, hark ! bowgh-vyowgh : the watch-dogs bark, Bowgh- 

wowgh. 
Ariel. Hark, hark ! I hear 
7 



82 THE TEMPEST. 



The strain of strutting chanticleer 
Cry cock-a-doodle-doo. 
Ferdinand. Where should this music be ? in air or earth ? 
It sounds no more : and sure it waits upon 
Some god o' th' island. Sitting on a bank 
Weeping against the king my father's wreck, 
This music crept by me upon the waters, 
Allaying both their fury and my passion 
With its sweet air ; thence I have follow'd it, 
Or it hath drawn me rather : — but 'tis gone. — 
No, it begins again. 

Ariel's song. 

Full fathom five thy father lies, 

Of his bones are coral made : 
Those are pearls that were his eyes, 

Nothing of him that doth fade, 
But doth suffer a sea change. 
Into something rich and strange. 
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell — 
Hark ! now I hear them, ding-dong bell. 
[Burden ding-dong. 

Ferdinand. The ditty does remember my drown'd father. 
This is no mortal business, nor no sound 
That the earth owns : I hear it now above me." 

The courtship between Ferdinand and Miranda is one of the 
cliief beauties of this play. It is the very purity of love. The 
pretended interference of Prospero with it heightens its interest, 
and is in character with the magician, whose sense of preterna. 
tural power makes him arbitrary, tetchy, and impatient of oppo- 
sition. 

The Tempest is a finer play than the Midsummer Night^s 
Dream, which has sometimes been compared with it ; but it is 
not so fine a poem. There are a greater number of beautiful 
passages in the latter. Two of the most striking in the Tempest 
are spoken by Prospero. The one is that admirable one when 
the vision which he has conjured up disappears, beginning 
" The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces," &c., which 
has been so often quoted, that every school-boy knows it by 
heart : the other is that which Prospero makes in abjuring his art : 



THE TEMPEST. 83 



" Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves. 
And ye that on the sands with printless foot 
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him 
When he comes back ; you demi-puppets, that 
By moon-shine do the green sour ringlets make, 
Whereof the ewe not bites ; and you whose pastime 
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice 
To hear the solemn curfew, by whose aid 
(Weak masters tho' ye be) I have be-dimm'd 
The noon-tide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds. 
And 'twixt the green-sea and the azur'd vault 
Set roaring war ; to the dread rattling thunder 
Have I giv'n fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak 
With his own bolt ; the strong-bas'd promontory 
Have I made shake, and by the spurs pluck'd up 
The pine and cedar ; graves at my command 
Have wak'd their sleepers ; op'd, and let 'em forth 
By my so potent art. But this rough magic 
I here abjure ; and when I have requir'd 
Some heav'nly music, which ev'n now I do 
(To work mine end upon their senses that 
This airy charm is for), I'll break my staff. 
Bury it certain fadoms in the earth. 
And deeper than did ever plummet sound, 
I'll drown my book." 

We must not forget to mention among other things in this 
play, that Shakspeare has anticipated nearly all the arguments 
©n the Utopian schemes of modern philosophy. 

" GoNZALo. Had I the plantation of this isle, my lord — 

Antonio. He'd sow 't with nettle seed. 

Sebastian. Or docks or mallows. 

GoNZALO. And were the king on 't, what would I do ? 

Sebastian. 'Scape being drunk, for want of wine. 

GoNZALo. r th' commonwealth I would by contraries 
Execute all things : for no kind of traffic 
Would I admit : no name of magistrate ; 
Letters should not be known ; wealth, poverty. 
And use of service, none ; contract, succession, 
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none ; 
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil ; 
No occupation, all men idle, all, 
And women too ; but innocent and pure ; 
No sov'reignty. 



84 THE TEMPEST. 



Sebastian. And yet he would be king on 't. 

Antonio. The latter end of his commonwealth forgets tne 
beginning. 

GoNZALO. All things in common nature should produce 
Without sweat or endeavor. Treason, felony, 
Sword, pike, knife, gun or need of any engine 
Would I not have ; but nature should bring forth, 
Of its own kind, all foizon, all abundance 
To feed my innocent people ! 

Sebastian. No marrying 'mong his subjects r 

Antonio. None, man ; all idle ; whores and knaves. 

GoNZALo. I would with such perfection govern, sir, 
T' excel the golden age. 

Sebastian. Save his majesty !" 



MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 



THE 



MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM- 



Bottom the Weaver is a character that has not had justice done 
him. He is the most romantic of mechanics. And what a list 
of companions he has — Quince the Carpenter, Snug the Joiner, 
Flute the Bellows-mender, Snout the Tinker, Starveling the 
Tailor ; and then again, what a group of fairy attendants, Puck, 
Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed ! It has been 
observed that Shakspeare's characters are constructed upon deep 
physiological principles; and there is something in this play 
which looks very like it. Bottom the Weaver, who takes the 
lead of 

" This crew of patches, rude mechanicals, 
That work for bread upon Athenian stalls," 

follows a sedentary trade, and he is accordingly represented as 
conceited, serious and fantastical. He is ready to undertake any- 
thing and everything, as if it was as much a matter of course 
as the motion of his loom and shuttle. He is for playing the 
tyrant, the lover, the lady, the lion. " He will roar that it shall 
do any man's heart good to hear him ;" and this being objected 
to as improper, he still has a resource in his good opinion of 
himself, and " will roar you an 'twere any nightingale." Snug 
the Joiner is the moral man of the piece, who proceeds by 
measurement and discretion in all things. You see him with his 
rule and compasses in his hand. " Have you the lion's part 
written ? Pray you, if it be, give it me, for I am slow of study." 



S6 MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 

— " You may do it extempore," says Quince, " for it is nothing but 
roaring." Starveling the Tailor keeps the peace, and objects to 
the lion and the drawn sword. " I believe we must leave the 
killing out when all's done." Starveling, however, does not 
start the objections himself, but seconds them when made by 
others, as if he had not spirit to express even his fears without 
encouragement. It is too much to suppose all this intentional : 
but it very luckily falls out so. Nature includes all that is im- 
plied in the most subtle analytical distinctions ; and the same 
distinctions will be found in Shakspeare. Bottom, who is not only 
chief actor, but stage-manager for the occasion, has a device to 
obviate the danger of frightening the ladies : " Write me a pro- 
logue, and let the prologue seem to say, we will do no harm 
with our swords, and that Pyramus is not killed indeed ; and 
for better assurance, tell them that I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus, 
but Bottom the Weaver: this will put them out of fear." Bot- 
tom seems to have understood the subject of dramatic illusion at 
least as well as any modern essayist. If our holiday mechanic 
rules the roast among his fellows, he is no less at home in his 
new character of an ass, " with amiable cheeks, and fair large 
ears." He instinctively acquires a most learned taste, and 
grows fastidious in the choice of dried peas and bottled hay. 
He is quite familiar with his new attendants, and assigns them 
their parts with all due gravity. " Monsieur Cobweb, good 
Monsieur, get your weapon in your hand, and kill me a red- 
hipt humble-bee on the top of a thistle, and, good Monsieur, bring 
me the honey-bag." What an exact knowledge is here shown 
of natural history ! 

Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, is the leader of the fairy band. 
He is the Ariel of the Midsummer Night's Dream ; and yet as 
unlike as can be to the Ariel in The Tempest. No other poet 
could have made two such different characters out of the same 
fanciful materials and situations. Ariel is a minister of retri- 
bution, who is touched with a sense of pity at the woes he in- 
flicts. Puck is a mad-cap sprite, full of wantonness and mis- 
chief, who laughs at those whom he misleads — " Lord, what fools 
these mortals be !" Ariel cleaves the air, and executes his 
mission with the zeal of a winged messenger; Puck is borne 



MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 87 

along on his fairy errand like the light and glittering gossamer 
before the breeze. He is, indeed, a most Epicurean little gentle- 
man, dealing in quaint devices, and faring in dainty delights. 
Prospero and his world of spirits are a set of moralists : but 
with Oberon and his fairies we are launched at once into the 
empire of the butterflies. How beautifully is the race of beings 
contrasted with the men and women actors in the scene, by a 
single epithet which Titania gives to the latter, " the human 
mortals !" It is astonishing that Shakspeare should be consid- 
ered, not only by foreigners, but by many of our own critics, as 
a gloomy and heavy writer, who painted nothing but " gorgons 
and hydras, and chimeras dire." His subtlety exceeds that of 
all other dramatic writers, insomuch that a celebrated person 
of the present day said that he regarded him rather as a meta- 
physician than a poet. His delicacy and sportive gaiety are 
infinite. In the Midsummer Night's Dream alone, we should 
imagine, there is more sweetness and beauty of description than 
in the whole range of French poetry put together. What we 
mean is this, that we will produce out of that single play ten 
passages, to which we do not think any ten passages in the 
works of the French poets can be opposed, displaying equal 
fancy and imagery. Shall we mention the remonstrance of 
Helena to Hermia, or Titania's description of her fairy train, 
or her disputes with Oberon about the Indian boy, or Puck's 
account of himself and his employments, or the Fairy Queen's 
ejchortation to the elves to pay due attendance upon her favorite, 
Bottom ; or Hippolita's description of a chase, or Theseus's an- 
swer ? The two last are as heroical and spirited as the others 
are full of luscious tenderness. The reading of this play is like 
wandering in a grove by moonlight : the descriptions breathe a 
sweetness like odors thrown from beds of flowers. 

Titania's exhortation to the fairies to wait upon Bottom, which 
is remarkable for a certain cloying sweetness in the repetition of 
the rhymes, is as follows : — ' 

" Be kind and courteous to this gentleman. 
Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes, 
Feed him with apricocks and dewberries ; ' 
.With purple grapes, green figs and mulberries ; 



MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 



The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees, 
And for night tapers crop their waxen thighs, 
And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes. 
To have my love to bed, and to arise : 
And pluck the wings from painted butterflies, 
To fan the moon-beams from his sleeping eyes ; 
Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies." 

The sounds of the lute and of the trumpet are not more dis- 
tinct than the poetry of the foregoing passage, and of the con- 
versation between Theseus and Hippolita. 

" Theseus. Go, one of you, find out the forester, 
For now our observation is perform'd ; 
And since we have the vaward of the day. 
My love shall hear the music of my hounds. 
Uncouple in the western valley, go. 
Dispatch, I say, and find the forester. 
We will, fair Queen, up to the mountain's top, 
And mark the musical confusion 
Of hounds and echo in conjunction. 

Hippolita, I was with Hercules and Cadmus once, 
When in a wood of Crete they bay'd the boar 
With hounds of Sparta ; never did I hear 
Such gallant chiding. For besides the groves, 
The skies, the fountains, every region near 
Seem'd all one mutual cry. I never heard 
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder. 

Theseus. My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind. 
So flew'd, so sanded, and their heads are hung 
With ears that sweep away the morning dew ; 
Crook-knee'd and dew-lap'd, like Thessalian bulls. 
Slow in pursuit, but matched in mouth like bells, 
Each under each. A cry more tunable 
Was never halloo'd to, nor cheer'd with horn. 
In Crete, in Sparta, nor in Thessaly : 
Judge when you hear." 

Even Titian never made a hunting-piece of a gusto so fresh 
and lusty, and so near the first ages of the world as this. 

It had been suggested to us that the Midsummer Night's 
Dream would do admirably to get up as a Christmas after-piece ; 
and our prompter proposed that Mr. Kean should play the part 
of Bottom, as worthy of his great talents. He might, in the dis- 



MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 89 

charge of his duty, offer to play the lady like any of our ac- 
tresses that he pleased, the lover or the tyrant like any of our 
actors that he pleased, and the lion like " the most fearful wild- 
fowl living." The carpenter, the tailor, and joiner, it vi^as 
thought, would hit the galleries. The young ladies in love would 
interest the side-boxes ; and Robin Goodfellow and his compa- 
nions excite a lively fellow-feeling in the children from school. 
There would be two courts, an empire within an empire, the 
Athenian and the Fairy King and Queen, with their attendants, 
and with all their finery. What an opportunity for processions, 
for the sound of trumpets and glittering of spears ! What a 
fluttering of urchins' painted wings ; what a delightful profusion 
of gauze clouds and airy spirits floating on them ! 

Alas, the experiment has been tried, and has failed ; not 
through the fault of Mr. Kean, who did not play the part of 
Bottom, nor of Mr. Liston, who did, and who played it well, but 
from the nature of things. The Midsummer Night's Dream, 
when acted, is converted from a delightful fiction into a dull 
pantomime. All that is finest in the play is lost in the represen- 
tation. The spectacle was grand ; but the spirit was evaporated, 
the genius was fled. Poetry and the stage do not agree well to- 
gether. The attempt to reconcile them in this instance fails not 
only of effect, but of decorum. The ideal can have no place 
upon the stage, which is a picture without perspective : every- 
thing there is in the fore-ground. That which was merely an 
airy shape, a dream, a passing thought, immediately becomes 
an unmanageable reality. Where all is left to the imagination 
(as is the case in reading) every circumstance, near or remote, 
has an equal chance of being kept in mind, and tells according 
to the mixed impression of all that has been suggested. But 
the imagination cannot sufficiently qualify the actual impres- 
sions of the senses. Any offence given to the eye is not to be 
got rid of by explanation. Thus Bottom's head in the play is a 
fantastic illusion, produced by magic spells : on the stage, it is 
an ass's head, and nothing more ; certainly a very strange cos- 
tume for a gentleman to appear in. Fancy cannot be embodied 
any more than a simile can be painted ; and it is as idle to at- 
tempt it as to personate Wall or Moonshine. Fairies are not 



90 MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 

incredible, but fairies six feet high are so. Monsters are not 
shocking if they are seen at a proper distance. When ghosts 
appear at mid-day, when apparitions stalk along Cheapside, then 
may the Midsummer Night's Dream be represented without in- 
jury at Covent Garden or at Drury Lane. The boards of a 
theatre and the regions of fancv are not the same thing. 



ROMEO AND JULIET. 91 



ROMEO AND JULIET. 



Romeo and Juliet is the only tragedy which Shakspeare has 
written entirely on a love-story. It is supposed to have been his 
first play, and it deserves to stand in that proud rank. There 
is the buoyant spirit of youth in every line, in the rapturous in- 
toxication of hope, and in the bitterness of despair. It has been 
said of Romeo and Juliet by a great critic, that " whatever is 
most intoxicating in the odor of a southern spring, languishing 
in the song of the nightingale, or voluptuous in the first opening 
of the rose, is to be found in this poem." The description is 
true ; and yet it does not come up to our idea of the play. For 
if it has the sweetness of the rose, it has its freshness too ; if it 
has the languor of the nightingale's song, it has also its giddy 
transport ; if it has the softness of a southern spring, it is as 
glowing and as bright. There is nothing of a sickly and senti- 
mental cast. Romeo and Juliet are in love, but they are not 
love-sick. Everything speaks the very soul of pleasure, the 
high and healthy pulse of the passions : the heart beats, the 
blood circulates and mantles throughout. Their courtship is not 
an insipid interchange of sentiments lip-deep, learnt at second- 
hand from poems and plays, — made up of beauties of the most 
shadowy kind, of" fancies wan," of evanescent smiles and sighs 
that breathe not, of delicacy that shrinks from the touch, and 
feebleness that scarce supports itself, an elaborate vacuity of 
thought, and an artificial dearth of sense, spirit, truth, and 
nature ! It is the reverse of all this. It is Shakspeare all over, 
and Shakspeare when he was young. 

We have heard it objected to Romeo and Juliet, that it is 
founded on an idle passion between a boy and a girl, who have 
scarcely seen and can have but little sympathy or rational 



92 ROMEO AND JULIET. 

esteem for one another, who have had no experience of the good 
or ills of life, and whose raptures or despair must be therefore 
equally groundless and fantastical. Whoever objects to the 
youth of the parties in this play as " too unripe and crude" to 
pluck the sweets of love, and wishes to see a first-love carried 
on into a good old age, and the passions taken at the rebound, 
when their force is spent, may find all this done in the Stranger 
and in other German plays, where they do things by contraries, 
and transpose nature to inspire sentiment and create philosophy. 
Shakspeare proceeded in a more straightforward, and, we think, 
more effectual way. He did not endeavor to extract beauty from 
wrinkles, or the wild throb of passion from the last expiring sigh 
of indifference. He did not " gather grapes of thorns nor figs 
of thistles." It was not his way. But he has given a picture of 
human life, such as it is in the order of nature. He has founded 
the passion of the two lovers not on the pleasures they had expe- 
rienced, but on all the pleasures they had not experienced. All 
that was to come of life was theirs. At that untried source of 
promised happiness they slaked their thirst, and the first eager 
draught made them drunk with love and joy. They were in full 
possession of their senses and their affections. Their hopes were 
of air, their desires of fire. Youth is the season of love, because 
the heart is then first melted in tenderness from the touch of 
novelty, and kindled to rapture, for it knows no end of its enjoy- 
ments or its wishes. Desire has no limit but itself. Passion, the 
love and expectation of pleasure, is infinite, extravagant, inex- 
haustible, till experience comes to check and kill it. Juliet 
exclaims on her first interview with Romeo — 

" My bounty is as boundless as the sea. 
My love as deep." 

And why should it not ? What was to hinder the thrilling tide 
of pleasure, which had just gushed from her heart, from flowing 
on without stint or measure, but experience which she was yet 
without ? What was to abate the transport of the first sweet 
sense of pleasure, which her heart and her senses had just tasted, 
but indifference, which she was yet a stranger to ? What was 
there to check the ardor of hope, of faith, of constancy, just 



ROMEO AND JULIET. 93 

rising in her breast, but disappointment which she had not yet 
felt ? As are the desires and hopes of youthful passion, such is 
the keenness of its disappointments, and their baleful effect. Such 
is the transition in this play from the highest bliss to the lowest 
despair, from the nuptial couch to an untimely grave. The only 
evil that even in apprehension befalls the two lovers is the loss 
of the greatest possible felicity ; yet this loss is fatal to both, for 
they had rather part with life than bear the thought of surviving 
all that had made life dear to them. In all this, Shakspeare has 
but followed nature, which existed in his time, as well as now. 
The modern philosophy, which reduces the whole theory of the 
mind to habitual impressions, and leaves the natural impulses of 
passion and imagination out of the account, had not then been 
discovered ; or, if it had, would have been little calculated for 
the uses of poetry. 

It is the inadequacy of the same false system of philosophy to 
account for the strength of our earliest attachments, which has 
led Mr. Wordsworth to indulge in the mystical visions of Pla- 
tonism in his Ode on the Progress of Life. He has very admi- 
rably described the vividness of our impressions in youth and 
childhood, and how " they fade by degrees into the light of 
common day," and he ascribes the change to the supposition of a 
pre-existent state, as if our early thoughts were nearer heaven, 
reflections of former trails of glory, shadows of our past being. 
This is idle. It is not from the knowledge of the past that the 
first impressions of things derive their gloss and splendor, but 
from our ignorance of the future, which fills the void to come 
with the warmth of our desires, with our gayest hopes and 
brightest fancies. It is the obscurity spread before it that colors 
the prospect of life with hope, as it is the cloud which reflects 
the rainbow. There is no occasion to resort to any mystical 
union and transmission of feeling, through different states of 
being, to account for the romantic enthusiasm of youth ; nor to 
plant the root of hope in the grave, nor to derive it from the 
skies. Its root is in the heart of man : it lifts its head above the 
stars. Desire and imagination are inmates of the human breast. 
The heaven " that lies about us in our infancy " is only a new 
world, of which we know nothing but what we wish it to be, 



94 ROMEO AND JULIET. 

and believe it all that we wish. In youth and boyhood, the 
world we live in is the world of desire, and of fancy : it is expe- 
rience that brings us down to the world of reality. What is it 
that in youth sheds a dewey light round the evening star ? That 
makes the daisy look so bright ? That perfumes the hyacinth ? 
That embalms the first kiss of love ? It is the delight of novelty, 
and the seeing no end to the pleasure that we fondly believe is 
still in store for us. The heart revels in the luxury of its own 
thoughts, and is unable to sustain the weight of hope and love 
that presses upon it. — The effects of the passion of love alone 
might have dissipated Mr. Wordsworth's theory, if he means 
anything more by it than an ingenious and poetical allegory. 
That at least is not a link in the chain let down from other worlds ; 
" the purple light of love " is not a dim reflection of the smiles of 
celestial bliss. It does not appear till the middle of life, and 
then seems like " another morn risen on mid-day." In this 
respect the soul comes into the world in utter nakedness. Love 
waits for the ripening of the youthful blood. The sense of plea- 
sure precedes the love of pleasure, but with the sense of plea- 
sure, as soon as it is felt, come thronging infinite desires and 
hopes of pleasure, and love is mature as soon as born. It withers 
and it dies almost as soon ! 

This play presents a beautiful coup cVocil of the progress of 
human life. In thought it occupies years, and embraces the 
circle of the affections from childhood to old age. Juliet has 
become a great girl, a young woman, since we first remember 
her a little thing in the idle prattle of the nurse. Lady Capulet 
was about her age when she became a mother, and old Capulet 
somewhat impatiently tells his younger visitors, 



-" I've seen the day 



That I have worn a visor, and could tell 

A whispering tale in a fair lady's ear, 

Such as would please : 'tis gone, 'tis gone, 'tis gone." 

Thus one period of life makes way for the following, and one 
generation pushes another off the stage. One of the most striking 
passages to show the intense feeling of youth in this play is 
Capulet's invitation to Paris to visit his entertainment. 



ROMEO AND JULIET. 95 

"At my poor house, look to behold this night 
Earth-treading stars that make dark heav'n light : 
Such comfort as do lusty young men feel 
When well apparel'd April on the heel 
Of limping winter treads, even such delight 
Among fresh female-buds shall you this nigh 
Inherit at my house." 

The feelings of youth and of the spring are here blended 
together like the breath of opening flowers. Images of vernal 
beauty appear to have floated before the author's mind, in writing 
this poem, in profusion. Here is another of exquisite beauty, 
brought in more by accident than by necessity. Montague 
declares of his son smit with a hopeless passion, which he will 
not reveal — 

" But he, his own affection's counsellor, 
Is to himself so secret and so close, 
So far from sounding and discovery. 
As is the bud bit with an envious worm, 
Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air ; 
Or dedicate his beauty to the sun." 

This casual description is as fall of passionate beauty as when 
Romeo dwells in frantic fondness on "the white wonder of his 
Juliet's hand." The reader may, if he pleases, contrast the 
exquisite pastoral simplicity of the above lines with the gorgeous 
description of Juliet when Romeo first sees her at her father's 
house, surrounded by company and artificial splendor. 

" What lady's that which doth enrich the hand 
Of yonder knight ? 

she doth teach the torches to burn bright , 
Her beauty hangs upon the cheek of night, 
Like a rich jewel in an ^thiop's ear." 

It would be hard to say which of the two garden scenes is the 
finest, that where he first converses with his love, or takes leave 
of her the morning after their marriage. Both are like a heaven 
upon earth ; the blissful bowers of Paradise let down upon this 
lower world. We will give only one passage of these well- 
known scenes to show the perfect refinement and delicacy of 



96 ROMEO AND JULIET. 



Shakspeare's conception of the fennale character. It is wonder- 
ful how Collins, who was a critic and a poet of great sensibility, 
should have encouraged the common error on this subject by 
saying — " But stronger Shakspeare felt for man alone." 

The passage we mean is Juliet's apology for her maiden 
boldness. 

" Thou know'st the mask of night is on my face ; 

Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek 

For that which thou hast heard me speak to-night. 

Fain would I dwell on form, fain, fain deny 

What I have spoke — but farewell compliment : 

Dost thou love me ? I know thou wilt say, ay, 

And I will take thee at thy word — Yet if thou swear'st. 

Thou may'st prove false ; at lovers' perjuries. 

They say Jove laughs. gentle Romeo, 

If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully ; 

Or if thou think I am too quickly won 

I'll frown and be perverse, and say thee nay. 

So thou wilt woo : but else not for the world. 

In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond ; 

And therefore thou may'st think my 'havior light ; 

Bnt trust me, gentleman, I'll prove more true 

Than those that have more cunning to be strange. 

I should have been more strange, I must confess, 

But that thou over-heard'st, ere I was ware, 

My true love's passion ; therefore pardon me. 

And not impute this yielding to light love. 

Which the dark night hath so discovered." 

In this and all the rest her heart, fluttering between pleasure, 
hope, and fear, seems to have dictated to her tongue, and " calls 
true love spoken, simple modesty." Of the same sort, but bolder 
in virgin innocence, is her soliloquy after her marriage with 
Romeo. 

" Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds. 
Towards Phoebus mansion ; such a waggoner 
As Phaeton would whip you to the west, 
And bring in cloudy night immediately. 
Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night ; 
That run-aways' eyes may wink ; and Romeo 

Leap to these arms, untalk'd of, and unseen ! 

Lovers can see to do their amorous rites 



ROMEO AND JULIET. 97 

By their own beauties : or if love be blind, 

It best agrees with night. — Come, civil night. 

Thou sober-suited matron, all in black, 

And learn me how to lose a winning match, 

Play'd for a pair of stainless maidenhoods: 

Hood my unmann'd blood bating in my cheeks, 

With thy black mantle ; till strange love, grown bold. 

Thinks true love acted, simple modesty. 

Come, night ! — Come, Romeo ! come, thou day in night ; 

For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night 

Whiter than new snow on a raven's back. 

Come, gentle night; come, loving, black-brow'd night, 
Give me my Romeo : and when he shall die. 
Take him and cut him out in little stars. 
And he will make the face of heaven so fine. 
That all the world shall be in love with night. 

And pay no worship to the garish sun. 

O, I have bought the mansion of a love. 
But not possess'd it ; and though I am sold, 
Not yet enjoy'd : so tedious is this day. 
As is the night before some festival 
To an impatient child, that hath new robes. 
And may not wear them." 

We the rather insert this passage here, inasmuch as we have 
no doubt it has been expunged from the family Shakspeare. 
Such critics do not perceive that the feelings of the heart sanc- 
tify, without disguising, the impulses of nature. Without re- 
finement themselves, they confound modesty with hypocrisy. 
Not so the German critic, Schlegel. Speaking of Romeo and 
Juliet, he says, " It was reserved for Shakspeare to unite purity 
of heart and the glow of imagination, sweetness and dignity of 
manners and passionate violence, in one ideal picture." The 
character is indeed one of perfect truth and sweetness. It has 
nothing forward, nothing coy, nothing affected or coquettish 
about it ; — it is a pure effusion of nature. It is as frank as it is 
modest, for it has no thought that it wishes to conceal. It re- 
poses in conscious innocence on the strength of its affections. 
Its delicacy does not consist in coldness and reserve, but in 
combining warmth of imagination and tenderness of heart with 
the most voluptuous sensibility. Love is a gentle fiame that 
rarefies and expands her whole being. What an idea of trem- 
8 



ROMEO AND JULIET. 



bling haste and airy grace, borne upon the thoughts of love, does 
the Friar's exclamation give of her, as she approaches his cell 
to be married — 

" Here comes the lady. Oh, so light a foot 
Will ne'er wear out the everlasting flint : 
A lover may bestride the gossamer, 
That idles in the wanton summer air, 
And yet not fall, so light is vanity." 

The tragic part of this character is of a piece with tne rest. 
It is the heroic founded on tenderness and delicacy. Of this 
kind are her resolution to follow the Friar's advice, and the con- 
flict in her bosom between apprehension and love when she 
comes to take the sleeping poison, Shakspeare is blamed for the 
mixture of low characters. If this is a deformity, it is the 
source of a thousand beauties. One instance is the contrast 
between the guileless simplicity of Juliet's attachment to her 
first love, and the convenient policy of the nurse in advising her 
to marry Paris, which excites such indignation in her mistress. 
" Ancient damnation ! oh most wicked fiend," &c. 

Romeo is Hamlet in love. There is the same rich exuberance 
of passion and sentiment in the one, that there is of thought and 
sentiment in the other. Both are absent and self-involved, both 
live out of themselves in a world of imagination. Hamlet is ab- 
stracted from everything ; Romeo is abstracted from everything 
but his love, and lost in it. His " frail thoughts dally with faint 
surmise," and are fashioned out of the suggestions of hope, •' the 
flatteries of sleep." He is himself only in his Juliet ; she is his 
only reality, his heart's true home and idol. The rest of the 
world is to him a passing dream. How finely is this character 
portrayed where he recollects himself on seeing Paris slain at the 
tomb of Juliet ! 

" What said my man when my betossed soul 
Did not attend him as we rode ? I think 
'He told me Paris should have married Juliet." 

And again, just before he hears the sudden tidings of her death — 

" If I may trust the flattery of sleep, 
My dreams presage some joyful news at hand ; 



ROMEO AND JULIET. 



My bosom's lord sits lightly on his throne, 

And all this day an unaccustom'd spirit 

Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts. 

I dreamt my lady came and found me dead 

(Strange dream ! that gives a dead man leave to think) 

And breath'd such life with kisses on my lips, 

That I reviv'd and was an emperor. 

Ah me ! how sweet is love itself possess'd, 

When but love's shadows are so rich in joy !" 

Romeo's passion for Juliet is not a first love : it succeeds and 
drives out his passion for another mistress, Rosaline, as the sun 
hides the stars. This is perhaps an artifice (not absolutely ne- 
cessary) to give us a higher opinion of the lady, while the first 
absolute surrender of her heart to him enhances the richness of 
the prize. The commencement, progress, and ending of his 
second passion are however complete in themselves, not injured, 
if they are not bettered by the first. The outline of the play is 
taken from an Italian novel ; but the dramatic arrangement of 
the difierent scenes between the lovers, the more than dramatic 
interest in the progress of the story, the development of the 
characters with time and circumstances, just according to the 
degree and kind of interest excited, are not inferior to the ex- 
pression of passion and nature. It has been ingeniously re- 
marked, among other proofs of skill in the contrivance of the 
fable, that the improbability of the main incident in the piece, 
the administering of the sleeping-potion, is softened and obviated 
from the beginning by the introduction of the Friar on his first 
appearance culling simples and descanting on their virtues. Of 
the passionate scenes in this tragedy, that between the Friar 
and Romeo when he is told of his sentence of banishment, that 
between Juliet and the Nurse when she hears of it, and of the 
death of her cousin Tybalt (which bear no proportion in her 
mind, when passion, after the first shock of surprise, throws its 
weight into the scale of her affections), and the last scene at the 
tomb, are among the most natural and overpowering. In all of 
these it is not merely the force of any one passion that is given, 
but the slightest and most unlooked-for transitions from one to 
another, the mingling currents of every different feeling rising 



100 ROMEO AND JULIET. 

up and prevailing in turn, swayed by the master-mind of the 
poet, as the waves undulate beneath the gliding storm. Thus 
when Juliet has by her complaints encouraged the Nurse to say, 
" Shame come to Romeo," she instantly repels the wish, which 
she had herself occasioned, by answering — 

•' Blister'd be thy tongue 
For such a wish, he was not born to shame. 
Upon his brow shame is ashamed to sit, 
For 'tis a throne where honor may be crown'd 
Sole monarch of the universal earth ! 
0, what a beast was I to chide him so I 

Nurse. Will you speak well of him that killed your cousin ? 

Juliet. Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband ? 
Ah, my poor lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name, 
When I, thy three-hours' wife, have mangled it .'". 

And then follows, on the neck of her remorse and returning 
fondness, that wish treading almost on the brink of impiety, but 
still held back by the strength of her devotion to her lord, that 
" father, mother, nay, or both were dead," rather than Romeo 
banished. If she requires any other excuse, it is in the manner 
in which Romeo echoes her frantic grief and disappointment in 
the next scene at being banished from her. Perhaps one of the 
finest pieces of acting that ever was witnessed on the stage, is 
Mr. Kean's manner of doing this scene and his repetition of the 
word Banished. He treads close indeed upon the genius of his 
author. 

A passage which this celebrated actor and able commentator 
on Shakspeare (actors are the best commentators on the poets) 
did not give with equal truth or force of feeling was the one 
which Romeo makes at the tomb of Juliet, before he drinks the 
poison. 

" Let me peruse this face — 



Mercutio's kinsman ! noble county Paris ! 
What said iny man when my betoss'd soul 
Did not attend him as we rode ! I think, 
He told me Paris should have marry'd Juliet. 
Said he not so ? or did I dream it so ? 
Or am I mad, hearing him talk of Juliet, 
To think it was so ? 0, give me thy hand, 



ROMEO AND JULIET. loi 

One writ with me in sour misfortune's book ! 

I'll bury thee in a triumphant grave 

For here lies Juliet. 



0, my love ! my wife ! 

Death, that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath, 
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty : 
Thou art not conquer'd ; beauty's ensign yet 
Is crimson in thy lips, and in thy cheeks. 

And Death's pale flag is not advanced there. 

Tybalt, ly'st thou there in thy bloody sheet ? 

0, what more favor can I do to thee. 

Than with that hand that cut thy youth in twain. 

To sunder his that was thine enemy ? 

Forgive me, cousin ! Ah, dear Juliet, 

Why art thou yet so fair ! I will believe 

That unsubstantial Death is amorous ; 

And that the lean abhorred monster keeps 

Thee here in dark to be his paramour. 

For fear of that, I will stay still with thee ; 

And never from this palace of dim night 

Depart again : here, here will I remain 

With worms that are thy chamber-maids ; 0, here 

Will I set up my everlasting rest ; 

And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars 

From this world- wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last . 

Arms, take your last embrace ! and lips, you 

The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss, 

A dateless bargain to engrossing death ! 

Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavory guide ! 
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on 
The dashing rocks, my sea-sick weary bark ! 
Here's to my love \—{Drinks.'\ 0, true apothecary ! 
Thy drugs are quick. — Thus with a kiss I die. 

The lines in this speech describing the loveliness of Juliet, 
who is supposed to be dead, have been compared to those in 
which it is said of Cleopatra after her death, that she looked " as 
she would take another Antony into her strong toil of grace ;" 
and a question has been started which is the finest, that we do 
not pretend to decide. We can more easily decide between 
Shakspeare and any other author, than between him and him- 
self. Shall we quote any more passages to show his genius or 
the beauty of Romeo and Juliet ? At that rate, we might 



102 ROMEO AND JULIET. 



quote the whole. The late Mr. Sheridan, on being shown a 

volume of the Beauties of Shakspeare, very properly asked 

" But where are the other eleven ?" The character of Mercutio 
in this play is one of the most mercurial and spirited of the pro- 
ductions of Shakspeare's comic muse. 



LEAE. 103 



lEAR, 



We wish that we could pass this play over, and say nothing 
about it. All that we can say must fall far short of the subject, 
or even of what we ourselves conceive of it. To attempt to give 
a description of the play itself, or of its effects upon the mind, is 
mere impertinence : yet we must say something. It is then the 
best of all Shakspeare's plays, for it is the one in which he was 
the most in earnest. He was here fairly caught in the web of 
his own imagination. The passion which he has taken as his 
subject is that which strikes its root deepest into the human 
heart ; of which the bond is the hardest to be unloosed ; and the 
cancelling and tearing to pieces of which gives the greatest re- 
vulsion to the frame. This depth of nature, this force of passion, 
this tug and war of the elements of our being, this firm faith in 
filial piety, and the giddy anarchy and whirling tumult of the 
thoughts at finding this prop failing it, the contrast between the 
fixed, immovable basis of natural affection, and the rapid, irregu- 
lar starts of imagination, suddenly wrenched from all its accus- 
tomed holds and resting-places in the soul, this is what Shak- 
speare has given, and what nobody else but he could give. So 
we believe. — The mind of Lear, staggering between the weight 
of attachment and the hurried movements of passion, is like a tall 
ship driven about by the winds, buffeted by the furious waves, 
but ihat still rides above the storm, having its anchor fixed in the 
bottom of the sea ; or it is like the sharp rock circled by the eddy- 
ing whirlpool that foams and beats against it, or like the solid 
promontory pushed from its basis by the force of an earthquake. 
The character of Lear itself is very finely conceived for the 
purpose. It is the only ground on which such a story could be 



104 LEAR. 

built with the greatest truth and effect. It is his rash hate, his 
violent impetuosity, his blindness to everything but the dictates 
of his passions or affections, that produces all his misfortunes, that 
aggravates his impatience of them, that enforces our pity for him. 
The part which Cordelia bears in the scene is extremely beauti- 
ful : the story is almost told in the first words she utters. We 
see at once the precipice on which the poor old king stands from 
his own extravagant and credulous impostunity, the indiscreet 
simplicity of her love (which, to be sure, has a little of her father's 
obstinacy in it), and the hollowness of her sisters' pretensions. 
Almost the first burst of that noble tide of passion, which runs 
through this play, is in the remonstrance of Kent to his royal 
master on the injustice of his sentence against his youngest 
daughter — " Be Kent unmannerly, when Lear is mad !" This 
manly plainness, which draws down on him the displeasure of 
the unadvised king, is worthy of the fidelity with which he ad- 
heres to his fallen fortunes. The true character of the two eldest 
daughters, Regan and Gonerill (they are so thoroughly hateful 
that we do not even like to repeat their names), breaks out in 
their answer to Cordelia, who desires them to treat their father 
well — " Prescribe not us our duties" — their hatred of advice be- 
ing in proportion to their determination to do wrong, and to their 
hypocritical pretensions to do right. Their deliberate affectation 
of virtue adds the last finishing to the odiousness of their cha- 
racters. It is the absence of this detestable quality that is the 
only relief in the character of Edmund the Bastard, and that at 
times reconciles us to him. We are not tempted to exaggerate 
the guilt of his conduct, when he himself gives it up as a bad 
business, and writes himself down " plain villain." Nothing 
more can be said about it. His religious honesty in this respect 
is admirable. One speech of his is worth a million. His father, 
Gloster, whom he has just deluded with a forged story of his 
brother Edgar's designs against his life, accounts for his unnatu- 
ral behavior, and the strange depravity of the times, from the late 
eclipses in the sun and moon. Edmund, who is in the secret, 
says when he is gone — " This is the excellent foppery of the 
world, that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of our 
own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the 



LEAR. 105 



moon, and stars : as if we were villains on necessity ; fools by 
heavenly compulsion ; knaves, thieves, and treacherous by sphe- 
rical predominance ; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an en- 
forced obedience of planetary influence ; and all that we are evil 
in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whore- 
master man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star ! 
My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon's tail, 
and my nativity was under Ursa Major : so that it follows, I am 
rough and lecherous. I should have been what I am, had the 
maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardising." 
— The whole character, its careless, light-hearted villainy, con- 
trasted with the sullen, rancorous malignity of Regan and Gone- 
rill, its connection with the conduct of the under-plot, in which 
Gloster's persecution of one of his sons and the ingratitude of 
another form a counterpart to the mistakes and misfortunes of 
Lear, — his double amour with the two sisters, and the share 
which he has in bringing about the fatal catastrophe, are all 
managed with an uncommon degree of skill and power. 

It has been said, and we think justly, that the third act of 
Othello, and the three first acts of Lear, are Shakspeare's great 
master-pieces in the logic of passion : that they contain the high- 
est examples not only of the force of individual passion, but of 
its dramatic vicissitudes and striking effects, arising from the dif- 
ferent circumstances and characters of the persons speaking. 
We see the ebb and flow of feeling, its pauses and feverish starts, 
its impatience of opposition, its accumulating force when it has 
time to recollect itself, the manner in which it avails itself of 
every passing word or gesture, its haste to repel insinuation, the 
alternate contraction and dilatation of the soul, and all "the daz- 
zling fence of controversy " in this mortal combat with poisoned 
weapons, aimed at the heart, where each wound is fatal. We have 
seen in Othello, how the unsuspecting frankness and impetuous 
passions of the Moor are played upon and exasperated by the art- 
ful dexterity of lago. In the present play, that which aggravates 
the sense of sympathy in the reader, and of uncontrollable anguish 
in the swoln heart of Lear, is the petrifying indiiference, the cold, 
calculating, obdurate selfishness of his daughters. His keen 
passions seem whetted on their stony hearts. The contrast 



106 LEAR. 



would be too painful, the shock too great, but for the interven- 
tion of the Fool, whose well-timed levity comes in to break the 
continuity of feeling when it can no longer be borne, and to 
bring into play again the fibres of the heart just as they are rigid 
from over-strained excitement. The imagination is glad to take 
refuge in the half comic, half-serious comments of the Fool, just 
as the mind under the extreme anguish of a surgical operation 
vents itself in sallies of wit. The character was also a gro- 
tesque ornament of the barbarous times, in which alone the tragic 
ground-work of the story could be laid. In another point of 
view it is indispensable, inasmuch as while it is a diversion to the 
too great intensity of our disgust, it carries the pathos to the 
highest pitch of which it is capable, by showing the pitiable weak- 
ness of the old king's conduct and its irretrievable consequences 
in the most familiar point of view. Lear may well " beat at the 
gate which let his folly in," after, as the Fool says, "he has 
made his daughters his mothers." The character is dropped in 
the third act to make room for the entrance of Edgar as mad 
Tom, which v/ell accords with the increasing bustle and wild- 
ness of the incidents ; and nothing can be more complete than 
the distinction between Lear's real and Edgar's assumed mad- 
ness, while the resemblance in the cause of their distresses, from 
the severing of the nearest ties of natural affection, keeps up a 
unity of interest. Shakspeare's mastery over his subject, if it 
was not art, was owing to a knowledge of the connecting links of 
the passions, and their effect upon the mind, still more wonderful 
than any systematic adherence to rules, and anticipated and out- 
did all the efforts of the most refined art, not inspired and render- 
ed instinctive by genius. 

One of the most perfect displays of dramatic power is the first 
interview between Lear and his daughter, after the designed 
aflronts upon him, which, till one of his knights reminds him of 
them, his sanguine temperament had led him to overlook. He 
returns with his train from hunting, and his usual impatience 
breaks out in his first words, " Let me not stay a jot for dinner ; 
go, get it ready." He then encounters the faithful Kent in dis- 
guise, and retains him in his service ; and the first trial of his 
honest duty is to trip up the heels of the officious Steward, who 



LEAR. 107 



makes so prominent and despicable a figure through the piece. 
On the entrance of Gonerill the following dialogue takes 
place : — 

" Lear. How now, daughter ? what makes that frontlet on ? 
Methinks, you are too much of late i' the frown 
Foci.. Thou wast a pretty fellow, when thou had'st no need ^ care fo 
her frowning ; now thou art an without a figure ; I ^^^f'^l^^^^'^^l 

art now ; I aik a fool, thou art nothing. Yes, forsooth, I w.ll hold m> 

tongue ; [To Gonerill So your face bids me, though you say nothing. 

Mum, mum. 

He that keeps nor crust nor crum, 
Weary of all, shall want some ■ 

That's a sheal'd peascod ! [PomtingtoLear. 

Gonerill. Not only, sir, this your all-licens d fool, 
But other of your insolent retinue 
Do hourly carp and quarrel ; breaking forth 
In rank and not-to-be-endured riots. 
I had thought, by making this well known unto you, 
To have found a safe redress ; but now grow fearful, 
By what yourself too late have spoke and done. 
That you protect this course, and put it on 
By your allowance ; which if you should, the fault 
Would not 'scape censure, nor the redresses sleep, 
Which in the tender of a wholesome weal, 
Might in their working do you that offence 
(Which else were shame), that then necessity 
Would call discreet proceeding. 
Fool. For you trow, nuncle, 

The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long, 
That it had its head bit off by its young. 

So out went the candle, and we were left darkling. 

Lear. Are you our daughter ? 

Gonerill. Come, sir, 
I would you would make use of that good wisdom 
Whereof I know you are fraught ; and put away 
These dispositions, which of late transform you 
From what you rightly are. 

Fool. May not an ass know when the cart draws the horse ? 

Whoop, Jug, I love thee. 

Lear. Does any here know me ? Why, this is not Lear : 

Does Lear walk thus .' speak thus ?-Where are his eyes ? 
Either his notion weakens, or his discernings 
Are lethargy'd Ha ! waking ?— 'Tis not so. 



i08 LEAR. 



Who is it that can tell me who I am ? — Lear's shadow ? 

I would learn that : for by the marks 

Of sov'reignty, of knowledge, and of reason, 

I should be false persuaded I had daughters. 

Your name, fair gentlewoman ? 

GoNERiLL. Come, sir : 
This admiration is much o' the favor 
Of other your new pranks. I do beseech you 
To understand my purposes aright : 
As you are old and reverend, you should be wise : 
Here do you keep a hundred knights and squires ; 
Men so disorder'd, so debauch'd and bold, 
That this our court, infected with their manners. 
Shows like a riotous inn : epicurism and lust 
Make it more like a tavern, or a brothel, 
Than a grac'd palace. The shame itself doth speak 
For instant remedy : be then desir'd 
By her, that else will take the thing she begs, 
A little to disquantity your train ; 
And the remainder, that shall still depend, 
To be such men as may besort your age, 
And know themselves and you. 

Lear. Darkness and devils ! 

Saddle my horse ; call my train together. 

Degenerate bastard ! I'll not trouble thee • 
Yet have I left a daughter. 

GoNERiLL. You strike my people ; and your disorder'd rabblf 
Make servants of their betters. 

Etiter Albany 

Lear. Wo, that too late repents — 0, sir, are you come : 

Is it your will .' speak, sir. — Prepare my horses. 

[ To Albany. 
Ingratitude ! thou marble-hearted fiend, 
More hideous, when thou show'st thee in a child, 
Than the sea-monster ! 

Albany. Pray, sir, be patient. 

Lear. Detested kite ! thou liest. [TV? Goner ill. 

My train are men of choice and rarest parts, 
That all particulars of duty know ; 
And in the most exact regard support 

The worships of their name. most small fault. 

How ugly didst thou in Cordelia show ! 
Which, like an engine, wrench'd my frame of nature 
From the fix'd place ; drew from my heart all love. 
And added to the gall. Lear, Lear, Lear ! 



LEAR. 109 



Beat at the gate, that let thy folly in, [Striking his head. 

And thy dear judgment out ! Go, go, my people ! 

Albany. My lord, I am guiltless, as I am ignorant 
Of what hath mov'd you. 

Lear. It may be so, my lord 

Hear, nature, hear ! dear goddess, hear ! 

Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend 

To make this creature fruitful ! 

Into her womb convey sterility ; 

Dry up in her the organs of increase ; 

And from her derogate body never spring 

A babe to honor her ! If she must teem, 

Create her child of spleen : that it may live, 

To be a thwart disnatur d torment to her ! 

Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth ; 

With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks , 

Turn all her mother's pains, and benefits. 

To laughter and contempt ; that she may feel 

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is 

To have a thankless child ! Away, away ! [Exit. 

Albany. Now, gcds, that we adore, whereof comes this ? 

Gonehill. Never afflict yourself to know the cause ; 
But let his disposition have that scope 
That dotage gives it. 

Re-enter Lear. 

Lear. What, fifty of my followers at a clap ! 
Within a fortnight ! 

x^lbatny. What's the matter, sir .' 

Lear. I'll tell thee ; life and death ! I am asham'd 
That thou hast power to shake my manhood thus : 

[To Gonerill 
That these hot tears, which break from me perforce. 

Should make thee worth them. Blasts and frogs upon thee ! 

The untented w^oundings of a father's curse 

Pierce every sense about thee ! Old fond eyes 

Beweep this cause again, I'll pluck you out ; 
And cast you, with the waters that you lose. 

To temper clay. Ha ! is it come to this .' 

Let it be so : Yet have I left a daughter. 

Who, I am sure, is kind and comfortable ; 
When she shall hear this of thee, with her nails 
She'll flea thy w^olfish visage. Thou shalt find. 
That rU resume the shape, which thou dost think 
I have cast off for ever. 

[Exeunt Lear, Kent, and Attendants.''* 



110 LEAR. 



This is certainly fine : no wonder that Lear says after it, " O 
let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heavens," feeling its effects by 
anticipation : but fine as is this burst of rage and indignation at 
the first blow aimed at his hopes and expectations, it is nothing 
near so fine as what follows from his double disappointment, and 
his lingering efforts to see which of them he shall lean upon for 
support and find comfort in, when both of his daughters turn 
against his age and weakness. It is with some difficulty that 
Lear gets to speak with his daughter Regan, and her husband, 
at Gloster's castle. In concert with Gonerill, they have left their 
own home on purpose to avoid him. His apprehensions are first 
alarmed by this circumstance, and when Gloster, whose guests 
they are, urges the fiery temper of the Duke of Cornwall as an 
excuse for not importuning him a second time, Lear breaks out, 

" Vengeance ! Plague ! Death ! Confusion ! 
Fiery ? What fiery quality ? Why, Gloster, 
I'd speak with the Duke of Cornwall and his wife." 

Afterwards, feeling perhaps not well him.self, he is inclined to 
admit their excuse from illness, but then recollecting that they 
have set his messenger (Kent) in the stocks, all his suspicions 
are roused again, and he insists on seeing them. The scene 
which ensues is of the higher power. If there is anything in 
any author like the yearning of the heart, the throes of tender- 
ness, the profound expression of all that can be thought and felt 
in the most heart-rending situations that it exhibits, we are glad 
of it ; but it is in some author that we have not read. 

The scene in the storm, where Lear is exposed to all the fury 
of the elements, though grand and terrible, is not so fine ; but 
the moralising scenes with mad Tom, Kent, and Gloster, are 
upon a par with the former. His exclamation in the supposed 
trial scene of his daughters, " See, the little dogs and all. Tray, 
Blanch, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me ;" his issuing his 
orders, " Let them anatomize Regan, see what breeds about her 
heart ;" and his reflection when he sees the misery of Edgar, 
" Nothing but his unkind daughters could have brought him to 
this ;" are in a style of pathos, where the extremest resources 
of the imagination are called in to lay open the deepest move- 



LEAR. Ill 

ments of the heart, which was peculiar to Shakspeare. la the 
same style and spirit is his interrupting the Fool, who asks, 
" whether a madman be a gentleman or a yeoman," by answer- 
ing " A king, a king !" 

The indirect part that Gloster takes in these scenes, where his 
generosity leads him to relieve Lear and resent the cruelty of 
his daughters, at the very time that he is himself instigated to 
seek the life of his son, and suffering under the sting of his sup- 
posed ingratitude, is a striking accompaniment to the situation 
of Lear. Indeed, the manner in which the threads of the story 
are woven together is almost as wonderful in the way of art as 
the carrying on the tide of passion, still varying and unimpaired, 
is on the score of nature. Among the remarkable instances of 
this kind are Edgar's meeting with his old blind father ; the 
deception he practises upon him when he pretends to lead him 
to the top of Dover-cliff — "Come on, sir, here's the place," to 
prevent his ending his life and miseries together; his encounter 
with the perfidious Steward, whom he kills, and his finding the 
letter from Gonerill to his brother upon him, which leads to the 
final catastrophe, and brings the wheel of Justice " full circle 
home" to the guilty parties. The bustle and rapid succession 
of events in the last scenes is surprising. But the meeting be- 
tween Lear and Cordelia is by far the most affecting part of 
them. It has all the wildness of poetry, and all the heartfelt 
truth of nature. The previous account of her reception of the 
news of his unkind treatment, her involuntary reproaches to her 
sisters, " Shame, ladies, shame," Lear's backwardness to see 
his daughter, the picture of the desolate state to which he is re- 
duced, " Alack, 'tis he ; why he was met even now, as mad as 
the vex'd sea, singing aloud," only prepare the way and heighten 
our expectation of what follows, and assuredly this expectation 
is not disappointed when, through the tender care of Cordelia, he 
revives and recollects her. 

'* Cordelia. How does my royal lord .' How fares your majesty ! 

Lear. You do me wrong, to take me out of the grave : 
Thou art a soul in bliss ; but I am bound 
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears 
Do scald like molten lead. 



112 LEAR. 



Cordelia. Sir, do you know me ? 

Lear. You are a spirit I know : when did you die .' 

C0RDE1.1A. Still, still far wide ! 

Physician. He's scarce awake ; let him alone awhile. 

Lear. Where have I been ? Where am I ? — Fair daylight .-' 

I am mightily abused — I should even die with pity. 

To see another thus. — I know not what to say. 

I will not swear these are my hands : — let's see ; 
I feel this pin prick. Would I were assur'd 
Of my condition. 

Cordelia. 0, look upon me, sir. 

And hold your hands in benediction o'er me : 

No, sir, you must not kneel. 

Lear. Pray do not mock me : 
I am a very foolish fond old man. 
Fourscore and upward ; 

Not an hour more, nor less : and, to deal plainly, 
I fear I am not in my perfect mind. 
Methinks I should know you. and know this man ; 
Yet I am doubtful : for I am mainly ignorant 
What place this is ; and all the skill I have 

Remembers not these garments ; nor I know not ^ 

Where I did lodge last night : do not laugh at me ; 
For, as I am a man, I think this lady 
To be my child Cordelia. 

Cordelia And so I am, I am !" 

Almost equal to this in awful beauty is their consolation of 
each other when, after the triumph of their enemies, they are led 
to prison. 

" Cordelia. We are not the first. 
Who, with best meaning, have incurr'd the worst. 
For thee, oppressed king, am I cast down ; 
Myself could else out-frown faJse fortune's frown. — 
Shall we not see these daughters, and these sisters ? 

Lear. No, no, no, no ! Come, let's away to prison : 
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage : 
When thou dost ask my blessing, I'll kneel dow^n. 
And ask of thee forgiveness : so we'll live, 
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh 
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues 
Talk of court news ; and we'll talk with them too — 
Who loses, and who wins ; who's in, who's out ; — 
And take upon us the mystery of things. 



LEAR. 113 



As if we were God's spies : and we'll wear out, 
In a wall'd prison, packs, and sects of great ones, 
That ebb and flow by the moon. 

Edmund. Take them away. 

Lear. Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, 
The gods themselves throw incense." 

The concluding events are sad, painfully sad ; but their 
pathos is extreme. The oppression of our feelings is relieved 
by the very interest we take in the misfortunes of others, and by 
the reflections to which they give birth. Cordelia is hanged in 
prison by the orders of the bastard Edmund, which are known 
too late to be countermanded, and Lear dies broken-hearted, 
lamenting over her. 

" Lear. And my poor fool is hang'd ! No, no, no life : 
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life. 
And thou no breath at all ? 0, thou wilt come no more, 

Never, never, never, never, never ! 

Pray you, undo this button : thank you, sir." 

He dies, and indeed we feel the truth of what Kent says on 
the occasion — 

" Vex not his ghost : 0, let him pass ! he hates him. 
That would upon the rack of this rough world 
Stretch him out longer." 

Yet a happy ending has been contrived for this play, which is 
approved of by Dr. Johnson and condemned by Schlegel. A 
better authority than either, on any subject in which poetry and 
feeling are concerned, has given it in favor of Shakspeare, in 
some remarks on the acting of Lear with which we shall con- 
clude this account. 

" The Lear of Shakspeare cannot be acted. The contempti- 
ble machinery with which they mimic the storm which he goes 
out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the 
real elements than any actor can be to represent Lear. The 
greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellec- 
tual ; the explosions of his passions are terrible as a volcano : 
9 



114 LEAR. 



they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that rich 
sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is 
laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant 
to be thought on ; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage 
we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impo- 
tence of rage ; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are 
Lear ; — we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur, 
which baffles the malice of daughters and storms ; in the aber- 
rations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of 
reasoning, immethodised from the ordinary, purposes of life, but 
exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will 
on the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks 
or tones to do with that sublime identification of his age with 
that of the heavens themselves, when in his reproaches to them 
for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them 
that " they themselves are old !" What gesture shall we ap- 
propriate to this ? What has the voice or the eye to do with 
such things ? But the play is beyond all art, as the tamperings 
with it show : it is too hard and stony : it must have love-scenes, 
and a happy ending. It is not enough that Cordelia is a 
daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate has put his hook 
in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, 
the showmen of the scene, to draw it about more easily. A 
happy ending ! — as if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone 
through, — the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair 
dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him. 
If he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this 
world's burden after, why all this pudder and preparation — 
why torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy ? As if 
the childish pleasure of getting liis gilt robes and sceptre again 
■ could tempt him to act over again his misused station, — as if at 
his years and with his experience, anything was left but to 
.die."* 

Four things have struck us in reading Lear : 

1. That poetry is an interesting study, for this reason, that 

* See an article, called Tlieatralia, in the second volume of the Reflector, 
by. Charles Lamb. 



LEAR. 115 



it relates to whatever is most interesting in human life. Who- 
ever therefore has a contempt for poetry, has a contempt for 
himself and humanity. 

2. That the language of poetry is superior to the language 
of painting ; because the strongest of our recollections relate to 
feelings, not to faces. 

3. That the greatest strength of genius is shown in describing 
the strongest passions : for the power of the imagination, in works 
of invention, must be in proportion to the force of the natural 
impressions, which are the subject of them. 

4. That the circumstance which balances the pleasure against 
the pain in tragedy, is, that in proportion to the greatness of the 
evil, is our sense and desire of the opposite good excited ; and 
that our sympathy with actual suffering is lost in the strong 
impulse given to our natural affections, and carried away with 
the swelling tide of passion, that gushes from and relieves the 
heart. 



U6 RICHARD II. 



RICHARD II. 



Richard II. is a play little known compared with Richard III., 
which last is a play that every unfledged candidate for theatrical 
fame chooses to strut and fret his hour upon the stage in ; yet 
we confess that we prefer the nature and feeling of the one to 
the noise and bustle of the other ; at least, as we are so often 
forced to see it acted. In Richard II., the weakness of the 
king leaves us leisure to take a greater interest in the misfor. 
tunes of the man. After the first act, in which the arbitrariness 
of his behavior only proves his want of resolution, we see him 
staggering under the unlooked-for blows of fortune, bewailing 
his loss of kingly power, not preventing it, sinking under the 
aspiring genius of Bolingbroke, his authority trampled on, his 
hopes failing him, and his pride crushed and broken down under 
insults and injuries, which his own misconduct has provoked, but 
which he has not courage or manliness to resent. The change 
of tone and behavior in the two competitors for the throne, ac- 
cording to their change of fortune, from the capricious sentence 
of banishment passed by Richard upon Bolingbroke, the sup- 
pliant offers and modest pretensions of the latter on his return, 
to the high and haughty tone with which he accepts Richard's 
resignation of the crown after the loss of all his power, the use 
which he makes of the deposed king to grace his triumphal pro- 
gress through the streets of London, and the final intimation of 
his wish for his death, which immediately finds a servile execu- 
tioner, is marked throughout with complete effect, and without 
the slightest appearance of effort. The steps by which Boling- 
broke mounts the throne, are those by which Richard sinks into 
the grave. We feel neither respect nor love for the deposed 



RICHARD II. 117 



monarch ; for he is as wanting in energy as in principle : but 
we pity him, for he pities himself His heart is by no means 
hardened against himself, but bleeds afresh at every new stroke 
of mischance ; and his sensibility, absorbed in his own person, 
and unused to misfortune, is not only tenderly alive to its own 
sufferings, but without the fortitude to bear them. He is, how- 
ever, human in his distresses ; for to feel pain and sorrow, weak- 
ness, disappointment, remorse and anguish, is the lot of human- 
ity, and we sympathize with him accordingly. The sufferings 
of the man make us forget that he ever was a king. 

The right assumed by sovereign power to trifle at its will with 
the happiness of others as a matter of course, or to remit its 
exercise as a matter of favor, is strikingly shown in the sentence 
of banishment so unjustly pronounced on Bolingbroke and Mow- 
bray, and in what Bolingbroke says when four years of his 
banishment are taken off, with as little reason. 

" How long a time lies in one little word ! 
Four lagging winters and four wanton springs 
End in a word : such is the breath of kings." 

A more affecting image of the loneliness of a state of exile 
can hardly be given, than by what Bolingbroke afterwards ob- 
serves of his having "sighed his English breath in foreign 
clouds ;" or than that conveyed in Mowbray's complaint at being 
banished for life. 

" The language I have learned these forty years, 
My native English, now I must forego; 
And now my tongue's use is to me no more 
Than an unstringed viol or a harp. 
Or like a cunning instrument cas'd up, 
Or being open, put into his hands 
That knows no touch to tune the harmony. 
I am too old to fawn upon a nurse, 
Too far in years to be a pupil now." — 

How very beautiful is all this, and, at the same time, how very 
English too ! 

Richard II. may be considered as the first of that series of 
English historical plays, in which " is hung armor of the in- 



us RICHARD II. 



vincible knights of old," in which their hearts seem to strike 
against their coats of mail, where their blood tingles for the 
fight, and words are but the harbingers of blows. Of this state 
of accomplished barbarism, the appeal of Bolingbroke and Mow- 
bray is an admirable specimen. Another of these " keen en- 
counters of their wits," which serve to whet the talkers' swords, 
is where Aumerle answers in the presence of Bolingbroke to the 
charge which Bagot brings against him, of being an accessory 
in Gloster's death. 

" FiTzwATER. If that thy valor stand on sympathies, 
There is my gage, Aumerle, in gage to thine ; 
By that fair sun that shows me where thou stand'st, 
I heard thee say, and vauntingly thou spak'st it, 
That thou wert cause of noble Gloster's death. 
If thou deny'st it twenty times thou liest, 
And I will turn thy falsehood to thy heart, 
Where it was forged, with my rapier's point. 

Aumerle. Thou dar'st not, coward, live to see the day. 

FiTzwATER. Now, by my soul, I would it were this hour. 

Aumerle. Fitzwater, thou art damn'd to hell for this. 

Percy. Aumerle, thou liest ; his honor is as true. 
In this appeal, as thou art all unjust ; 
And that thou art so, there I throw my gage 
To prove it on thee, to th' extremest point 
Of mortal breathing. Seize it, if thou dar'st. 

Aumerle. And if I do not, may my hands rot off. 
And never brandish more revengeful steel 
Over the glittering helmet of my foe. 
Who sets me else ? By heav'n, I'll throw at all. 
I have a thousand spirits in my breast. 
To answer twenty thousand such as you. 

Surry. My Lord Fitzwater, I remember well 
The very time Aumerle and you did talk. 

Fitzwater. My lord, 'tis true : you were in presence then r 
And you can witness with me, this is true. 

Surry. As false, by heav'n, as heav'n itself is true. 

Fitzwater. Surry, thou liest. 

Surry. Dishonorable boy ! 
That lie shall lie so heavy on my sword. 
That it shall render vengeance and revenge 
Till thou the lie-giver and that lie rest 
In earth as quiet as thy father's skull. 
In proof whereof, there is mine honor's pawn : 
E»gage it to the trial, if thou dar'st. 



RICHARD II. 119 



FiTzwATER. How fondly dost thou spur a forward horse : 
If I dare eat, or drink, or breathe, or live, 
I dare meet Surry in a wilderness. 
And spit upon him, whilst I say he lies, 
And lies, and lies : there is my bond of faith, 
To tie thee to thy strong correction. 
As I do hope to thrive in this new world, 
Aumerle is guilty of my true appeal." 

The truth is, that there is neither truth nor honor in all these 
noble persons : they answer words with words, as they do blows 
with blows, in mere self-defence : nor have they any principle 
whatever but that of courage in maintaining any wrong they dare 
commit, or any falsehood which they find it useful to assert. 
How different were these noble knights and " barons bold " from 
their more refined descendants in the present day, who, instead 
of deciding questions of right by brute force, refer everything 
to convenience, fashion, and good breeding ! In point of any 
abstract love of truth or justice, they are just the same now 
that they were then. 

The characters of old John of Gaunt, and of his brother York, 
uncles to the King, the one stern and foreboding, ihe other honest, 
good-natured, doing all for the best, and therefore doing nothing, 
are well kept up. The speech of the former, in praise of Eng- 
land, is one of the most eloquent that ever was penned. We 
should, perhaps, hardly be disposed to feed the pampered ego- 
tism of our countrymen by quoting this description, were it not 
that the conclusion of it (which looks prophetic) may qualify any 
improper degree of exultation. 

" This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle. 
This earth of Majesty, this seat of Mars, 
This other Eden, demi-Paradise, 
This fortress built by nature for herself 
Against infection and the hand of war ; 
This happy breed of men, this little world, 
This precious stone set in the silver sea, 
Which serves it in the office of a wall 
(Or as a moat defensive to a house) 
Against the envy of less happy lands . 
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, 



*# 



120 RICHARD II. 



Fear'd for their breed and famous for their birth, 
Renown'd for their deeds, as far from home. 
For Christian service and true chivalry. 
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry 
Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's son; 
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land, 
Dear for her reputation through the world. 
Is now leas'd out (I die pronouncing it) 
Like to a tenement or pelting farm. 
England bound in with the triumphant sea, 
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious surge 
? Of wat'ry Neptune, is bound in with shame. 

With inky-blots and rotten parchment bonds. 
That England, that was wont to conquer others. 
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself" 

The character of Bolingbroke, afterwards Henry IV., is drawn 
with a masterly hand : — patient for occasion, and then steadily 
availing himself of it, seeing his advantage afar off, but only 
seizing on it when he has it within his reach, humble, crafty, 
bold, and aspiring, encroaching by regular but slow degrees, 
building power on opinion, and cementing opinion by power. His 
disposition is first unfolded by Richard himself, who however is 
too self-willed and secure to make a proper use of his know- 
ledge. 

" Ourself and Bushy, Bagot here and Green, 
Observed his courtship of the common people : 
How he did seem to dive into their hearts, 
With humble and familiar courtesy. 
What reverence he did throw away on slaves ; 
Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles, 
And patient under-bearing of his fortune. 
As 'twere to banish their affections with him. 
Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench ; 
A brace of draymen bid God speed him well. 
And had the tribute of his supple knee, 
With thanks, my countrymen, my loving friends ; 
As were our England in reversion his, 
And he our subjects' next degree in hope." 

Afterwards, he gives his own character to Percy, in these words 
" I thank thee, gentle Percy, and be sure 



RICHARD II. 121 



I count myself in nothing else so happy, 
As in a soul rememb'ring my good friends ; 
And as my fortune ripens with thy love. 
It shall be still thy true love's recompense." 

We know how he afterwards kept his promise. His bold as- 
sertion of his own rights, his pretended submission to the king, 
and the ascendency which he tacitly assumes over him without 
openly claiming it, as soon as he has him in his power, are cha- 
racteristic traits of this ambitious and politic usurper. But the 
part of Richard himself gives the chief interest to the play. 
His folly, his vices, his misfortunes, his reluctance to part with 
the crown, his fear to keep it, his weak and womanish regrets, 
his starting tears, his fits of hectic passion, his smothered majes- 
ty, pass in successi6n before us, and make a picture as natural 
as it is affecting. Among the most striking touches of pathos are 
his wish, " O that I were a mockery king of snow, to melt away 
before the sun of Bolingbroke," and the incident of the poor 
groom who comes to visit him in prison, and tells him how " it 
yearned his heart that Bolingbroke upon his coronation day rode 
on Roan Barbary." We shall have occasion to return hereafter 
to the character of Richard II. in speaking of Henry VI. There 
is only one passage more, the description of his entrance into 
London with Bolingbroke, which we should like to quote here, 
if it had not been so used and worn out, so thumbed and got by 
rote, so praised and painted ; but its beauty surmounts al^l these 
considerations. 

" Duchess. My lord, you told me you vi^ould tell the rest. 
When weeping made you break the story off 
Of our two cousins coming into London, 

York. Where did I leave ? 

Duchess. At that sad stop, my lord, 
Where rude misgoveru'd hands, from window tops, 
Threw dust and rubbish on king Richard's head. 

York. Then, as I said, the duke, great Bolingbroke, 
Mounted upon a hot and fiery steed. 
Which his aspiring rider seem'd to know, 
With slow, but stately pace, kept on his course. 
While all tongues cried— God save thee, Bolingbroke ! 
You would have thought the very windows spake. 



122 RICHARD II. 



So many greedy looks of young and old 
Through casements darted their desiring eyes 
Upon his visage ; and that all the walls, 
With painted imag'ry, had said at once — 
Jesu preserve thee ! welcome Bolingbroke ! 
Whilst he, from one side to the other turning, 
Bare-headed, lower than his proud steed's neck, 
Bespake them thus — I thank you, countrymen : 
And thus still doing thus he pass'd along. 

Duchess. Alas, poor Richard ! where rides he the while ? 

York. As in a theatre, the eyes of men, 
After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, 
Are idly bent on him that enters next. 
Thinking his prattle to be tedious : 
Even so, or with much more contempt, men's eyes 
Did scowl on Richard ; no man cried God save him ! 
No joyful tongue gave him his welcome home : 
But dust was thrown upon his sacred head ! 
Which with such gentle sorrow he shook off— 
His face still combating with tears and smiles. 
The badges of his grief and patience — 
That had not God, for some strong purpose, steel'd 
The hearts of men, they must perforce have melted, 
And barbarism itself have pitied him." 



HENRY IV. 123 



HENRY IV 



IN TWO PARTS. 



If Shakspeare's fondness for the ludicrous sometimes led to 
faults in his tragedies (which was not often the case) he has 
made us amends by the character of FalstafF. This is perhaps 
the most substantial comic character that ever was invented. 
Sir John carries a most portly presence in the mind's eye ; and 
in him, not to speak it profanely, " we behold the fulness of the 
spirit of wit and humor bodily." We are as well acquainted 
with his person as his mind, and his jokes come upon us with 
double force and relish from the quantity of fles-h through which 
they make their way, as he shakes his fat sides with laughter, 
or " lards the lean earth as he walks along." Other comic cha- 
racters seem, if we approach and handle them, to resolve them- 
selves into air, " into thin air;" but this is embodied and palpa- 
ble to the grossest apprehension : it lies " three fingers deep upon 
the ribs," it plays about the lungs and the diaphragm with all 
the force of animal enjoyment. His body is like a good estate 
to his mind, from which he receives rents and revenues of profit 
and pleasure in kind, according to its extent, and the richness of 
the soil. Wit is often a meagre substitute for pleasurable sen- 
sation ; an effusion of spleen and petty spite at the comforts of 
others, from feeling none in itself Falstaff 's wit is an emana- 
tion of a fine constitution ; an exuberance of good-humor and 
good-nature ; an overflowing of his love of laughter and good- 
fellowship ; a giving vent to his heart's ease and over-content- 
ment with himself and others. He would not be in character, 
if he were not so fat as he is ; for there is the greatest keeping 



124 HENRY IV. 



in the boundless luxury of his imagination and the pampered 
self-indulgence of his physical appetites. He manures and 
nourishes his mind with jests, as he does his body with sack and 
sugar. He carves out his jokes, as he would a capon, or a 
haunch of venison, where there is cut and come again ; and 
pours out upon them the oil of gladness. His tongue drops 
fatness, and in the chambers of his brain '' it snows of meat and 
drink." He keeps up perpetual holiday and open house, and we 
live with him in a round of invitations to a rump and dozen. — 
Yet we are not to suppose that he was a mere sensualist. All 
this is as much in imagination as in reality. His sensuality 
does not engross and stupify his other faculties, but " ascends me 
into the brain, clears away all the dull, crude vapors that en- 
viron it, and makes it full of nimble, fiery, and delectable 
shapes." His imagination keeps up the ball after his senses 
have done with it. He seems to have even a greater en- 
joyment of the freedom from restraint, of good cheer, of 
his ease, of his vanity, in the ideal exaggerated descriptions 
which he gives of them, than in fact. He never fails to 
enrich his discourse with allusions to eating and drinking, 
but we never see him at table. He carries his own larder 
about with him, and he is himself " a tun of man." His 
pulling out the bottle in the field of battle is a joke to show his 
contempt for glory accompanied with danger, his systematic ad- 
herence to his Epicurean philosophy in the most trying circum- 
stances. Again, such is his deliberate exaggeration of his own 
vices, that it does not seem quite certain whether the account of 
his hostess's bill, found in his pocket, with such an out-of-the- 
way charge for capons and sack with only one halfpenny- worth 
of bread, was not put there by himself as a trick to humor the 
jest upon his favorite propensities, and as a conscious caricature 
of himself. He is represented as a liar, a braggart, a coward, 
a glutton, &c., and yet we are not offended but delighted with 
him ; for he is all these as much to amuse others as to gratify 
himself. He openly assumes all these characters to show the 
humorous part of them. The unrestrained indulgence of his 
own ease, appetites, and convenience, has neither malice nor hy- 
pocrisy in it. In a word, he is an actor in himself almost as 



HENRY IV. 125 



much as upon the stage, and we no more object to the charac- 
ter of FalstafF in a moral point of view than we should think of 
bringing an excellent comedian, who should represent him to 
the life, before one of the police offices. We only consider the 
number of pleasant lights in which he puts certain foibles (the 
more pleasant as they are opposed to the received rules and neces- 
sary restraints of society) and do not trouble ourselves about the 
consequences resulting from them, for no mischievous conse- 
quences do result. Sir John is old as well as fat, which gives 
a melancholy retrospective tinge to the character ; and by the 
disparity between his inclinations and his capacity for enjoy- 
ment, makes it still more ludicrous and fantastical. 

The secret of Falstaff's wit is for the most part a masterly 
presence of mind, an absolute self-possession, which nothing can 
disturb. His repartees are involuntary suggestions of his self- 
love ; instinctive evasions of everything that threatens to inter- 
rupt the career of his triumphant jollity and self-complacency. 
His very size floats him out of all his difficulties in a sea of rich 
conceits ; and he turns round on the pivot of his convenience, 
with every occasion and at a moment's warning. His natural re- 
pugnance to every unpleasant thought or circumstance of itself 
makes light of objections, and provokes the most extravagant 
and licentious answers in his own justification. His indifference 
to truth puts no check upon his invention, and the more impro- 
bable and unexpected his contrivances are, the more happily 
does he seem to be delivered of them, the anticipation of their 
effect acting as a stimulus to the gaiety of his fancy. The suc- 
cess of one adventurous sally gives him spirits to undertake 
another : he deals always in round numbers, and his exaggera- 
tions and excuses are " open, palpable, monstrous as the father 
that begets them." His dissolute carelessness of what he says 
discovers itself in the first dialogue with the Prince. 

" Falstaff. By the lord, thou say'st true, lad ; and is not mine hostess 
of the tavern a most sweet wench ? 

P. Henry, As the honey of Hibla, my old lad of the castle; and is not 
a buff-jerkin a most sweet robe of durance ? 

Falstaff. How now, how now, mad wag, what, in thy quips and thy 
quiddities ? what a plague have I to do with a bufF-jerkin ? 



126 HENRY IV. 



P. Henry. Why, what a pox have I to do with mine hostess of the 
tavern ?" 

In the same scene he afterwards affects melancholy, from pure 
satisfaction of heart, and professes reform, because it is the far- 
thest thing in the world from his thoughts. He has no qualms 
of conscience, and therefore would as soon talk of them as of 
anything else when the humor takes him. 

" FALSTAFr. But Hal, I pr'ythee trouble me no more with vanity. I 
would to God thou and I knew where a commodity of good names were to 
be bought : an old lord of council rated me the other day in the street about 
you, sir; but I mark'd him not, and yet he talked very wisely, and in the 
street too. 

P. Henry. Thou didst well, for wisdom cries out in the street, and no 
man regards it. 

Falstaff. 0, thou hast damnable iteration, and art indeed able to cor- 
rupt a saint. Thou hast done much harm unto me, Hal, God forgive thee 
for it. Before I knew thee, Hal, I knew nothing, and now I am, if a man 
should speak truly, little better than one of the wicked. I must give over 
this life, and I will give it over, by the lord ; an I do not, I am a villain. 
I'll be damn'd for never a king's son in Christendom. 

P. Henry. Where shall we take a purse to-morrow, Jack ? 

Falstaff. Where thou wilt, lad, I'll make one; an I do not, call me 
villain, and baffle me. 

P. Henry. I see good amendment of life in thee, from praying to purse- 
taking. 

Falstaff. Why, Hal, 'tis my vocation, Hal. 'Tis no sin for a man t€ 
labor in his vocation." 

Of the other prominent passages, his account of his pretended 
resistance to the robbers, " who grew from four men in buckram 
into eleven " as the imagination of his own valor increased with 
his relating it, his getting off when the truth is discovered by 
pretending he knew the Prince, the scene in which in the person 
of the old king he lectures the prince and gives himself a good 
character, the soliloquy on honor, and description of his new- 
raised recruits, his meeting with the chief justice, his abuse of 
the Prince and Poins, who overhear him, to Doll Taresheet, his 
reconciliation with Mrs. Quickly who has arrested him for an 
old debt, and whom he persuades to pawn her plate to lend him 
ten pounds more, and the scenes with Shallow and Silence, are 



HENRY IV. 127 



all inimitable. Of all of them, the scene in which Falstaff plays 
the part, first, of the King, and then of Prince Henry, is the one 
that has been the most often quoted. We must quote it once 
more in illustration of our remarks. 

** Falstaff. Harry, I do not only marvel where thou spendest thy time, 
but also how thou art accompanied : for though the camomile, the more it 
is trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted, the 
sooner it wears. That thou art my son, I have partly thy mother's word, 
partly my own opinion ; but chiefly, a villainous trick of thine eye, and a 
foolish hanging of thy nether lip, that doth warrant me. If then thou be 

son to me, here lies the point ; Why, being son to me, art thou so pointed 

at ? Shall the blessed sun of heaven prove a micher, and eat blackberries f 
a question not to be ask'd. Shall the son of England prove a thief, and 
take purses ? a question not to be ask'd. There is a thing, Harry, which 
thou hast often heard of, and it is known to many in our land by the name 
of pitch : this pitch, as ancient writers do report, doth defile; so doth the 
company thou keepest: for Harry, now I do not speak to thee in drink, but 
in tears ; not in pleasure, but in passion ; not in words only, but in woes 
also : — and yet there is a virtuous man, whom I have often noted in thy 
company, but I know not his name. 

P. Henry. What manner of man, an it like your majesty ? 

Falstaff. A goodly portly man, i' faith, and a corpulent; of a cheer- 
ful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble carriage ; and, as I think, his 
age some fifty, or, by'r-lady, inclining to threescore ; and now I do remem- 
ber me, his name is Falstaff: if that man should be lewdly given, he de- 
ceiveth me ; for, Harry, I see virtue in his looks. If then the fruit may be 
known by the tree, as the tree by the fruit, then peremptorily I speak it, 
there is virtue in that Falstaff: him keep with, the rest banish. And tell 
me now, thou naughty varlet, tell me, where hast thou been this month ? 

P. Henry. Dost thou speak like a king ? Do thou stand for me, and 
I'll play my father. 

Falstaff. Depose me ? if thou dost it half so gravely, so majestically, 
both in word and matter, hang me up by the heels for a rabbit-sucker, or a 
poulterer's hare. 

P. Henry. Well, here I am set. 

Falstaff. And here I stand : — judge, my masters. 

P. Henry. Now, Harry, whence come you ? 

Falstaff. My noble lord, from Eastcheap. 

P. Henry. The complaints I hear of thee are grievous. 

Falstaff. S'blood, my lord, they are false : — nay, I'll tickle ye for a 
young prince, i' faith. 

P. Henry. Swearest thou, ungracious boy ? henceforth ne'er look on 
me. Thou art violently carried away from grace : there is a devil haunts 
thee, in the likeness of a fat old man ; a tun of man is thy companion. Why 



128 HENRY IV. 



dost thou converse with that trunk of humors, that bolting-hutch of beast- 
liness, that swoln parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuft 
cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manning-tree ox with the pudding in his 
belly, that reverend vice, that grey iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity 
in years ? wherein is he good, but to taste sack and drink it ? wherein neat 
and cleanly, but to carve a capon and eat it ? wherein cunning, but in craft ? 
wherein crafty, but in villainy ? wherein villainous, but in all things ? 
wherein worthy, but in nothing ? 

Falstaff. I would your grace would take me with you, whom means 
your grace ? 

P. Henry. That villainous, abominable mis-leader of youth, Falstaff, 
that old white-bearded Satan. 

Falstaff. My lord, the man I know. 

P. Henry. I know thou dost. 

Falstaff. But to say, I know more harm in him than in myself, were 
to say more than I know. That he is old (the more the pity), his white 
hairs do witness it : but that he is (saving your reverence) a whore-master, 
that I utterly deny. If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked ! 
if to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is 
damned : if to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh's lean kine are to be 
loved. No, my good lord ; banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins : 
but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant 
Jack Falstafi; and therefore more valiant, being as he is, old Jack Falstaff, 
banish not him thy Harry's company ; banish plump Jack, and banish all 
the world. 

P. Henry. I do, I will. 

{Knocking ; and Hostess and Bardolph go out. 

Re-enter Bardolph, running. 

Bardolph. O, my lord, my lord ; the sheriff, with a most monstrous 
watch, is at the door, 

Falstaff. Out, you rogue ! play out the play : I have much to say in 
the behalf of that same Falstaff." 

One of the most characteristic descriptions of Sir John is that 
which Mrs. Quickly gives of him when he asks her " What is 
the gross sum that I owe thee ?" 

" Hostess. Marry, if thou wert an honest man, thyself, and the money 
too. Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dol- 
phin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire on Wednesday in 
Whitsun-week, when the prince broke thy head for likening his father to 
a singing man of Windsor ; thou didst swear to me then, as I was washing 
thy wound, to marry me, and make me my lady thy wife. Canst thou deny 
it ? Did not goodwife Keech, the butcher's wife, come in then, and call 



HENRY IV. 129 



me gossip Quickly ? coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar ; telling us she 
had a good dish of prawns ; whereby thou didst desire to eat some ; where- 
by I told thee, they were ill for a green wound ? And didst thou not, when 
she was gone down stairs, desire me to be no more so familiarity with such 
poor people ; saying, that ere long they should call me madam ? And didst 
thou not kiss me, and bid me fetch thee thirty shillings ? I put thee now 
to thy book-oath ; deny it if thou canst." 

This scene is to us the most convincing proof of Falstaff's 
power of gaining over the good will of those he was familiar 
with, except indeed Bardolph's somewhat profane exclamation 
on hearing the account of his death, " Would I were with him, 
wheresoe'er he is, whether in heaven or hell." 

One of the topics of exulting superiority over others most 
common in Sir John's mouth, is his corpulence, and the exterior 
marks of good living which he carries about him, thus " turning 
his vices into commodity." He accounts for the friendship be- 
tween the Prince and Poins, from " their legs being both of a 
bigness;" and compares Justice Shallow to "a man made after 
supper of a cheese-paring." There cannot be a more striking 
gradation of character than that between Falstaff and Shallow, 
and Shallow and Silence. It seems difficult at first to fall lower 
than the squire ; but this fool, great as he is, finds an admirer 
and humble foil in his cousin Silence. Vain of his acquaint- 
ance with Sir John, who makes a butt of him, he exclaims, 
" Would, cousin Silence, that thou had'st seen that which this 
knight and I have seen !" — " Ay, Master Shallow, we have heard 
the chimes at midnight," says Sir John. To Falstaff's observa- 
tion, " I did not think Master Silence had been a man of this 
mettle," Silence answers, " Who, I ? I have been merry twice 
and once ere now." What an idea is here conveyed of a pro- 
digality of living ? What good husbandry and economical self- 
denial in his pleasures ? What a stock of lively recollections ? 
It is curious that Shakspeare has ridiculed in Justice Shallow, 
who was "in some authority under the king," that disposition to 
unmeaning tautology which is the regal infirmity of later times, 
and which, it may be supposed, he acquired from talking to his 
cousin Silence, and receiving no answers. 

10 



130 HENRY IV. 



*' Falstaff, You have here a goodly dwelling, and a rich. 

Shallow. Barren, barren, barren ; beggars all, beggars all, Sir John : 
marry, good air. Spread Davy, spread Davy. Well said, Davy. 

Falstaff. This Davy serves you for good uses. 

Shallow. A good varlet, a good variet, a very good variet. By the 
mass, I have drank too much sack at supper. A good variet. Now sit 
down, now sit down. Come, cousin." 

The true spirit of humanity, the thorough knowledge of the 
stuff we are made of, the practical wisdom, with the seeming 
fooleries in the whole of the garden-scene at Shallow's country, 
seat, and just before, in the exquisite dialogue between him and 
Silence on the death of old Double, have no parallel anywhere 
else. In one point of view they are laughable in the extreme ; 
in another they are equally affecting, if it is affecting to show 
what a little thing is human life, what a poor forked creature 
man is ! 

The heroic and serious part of these two plays, founded on 
the story of Henry IV., is not inferior to the comic and farcical. 
The characters of Hotspur and Prince Henry are two of the 
most beautiful and dramatic, both in themselves and from con- 
trast, that ever were drawn. They are the essence of chivalry. 
We like Hotspur the best, upon the whole, perhaps because he 
was unfortunate. The characters of their fathers, Henry IV. 
and old Northumberland, are kept up equally well. Henry 
naturally succeeds by his prudence and caution in keeping what 
he has got ; Northumberland fails in his enterprise from an ex- 
cess of the same quality, and is caught in the web of his own 
-cold, dilatory policy. Owen Glendower is a masterly charac- 
ter. It is as bold and original as it is intelligible and thoroughly 
natural. The disputes between him and Hotspur are managed 
with infinite address and insight into nature. We cannot help 
pointing out here some very beautiful lines, where Hotspur de- 
scribes the fight between Glendower and Mortimer. 

" When on the gentle Severn's sedgy bank, 

In single opposition hand to hand. 

He did confound the best part of an hour 

In changing hardiment with great Glendower ; 

Three times they breath'd, and three times did they drink. 

Upon agreement, of swift Severn's flood ; 



HENRY IV. 131 



Who then affrighted with their bloody looks, 
Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds, 
And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank, 
Blood-stained with these valiant combatants." 

The peculiarity and the excellence of Shakspeare's poetry is, 
that it seems as if he made his imagination the hand-maid of 
nature, and nature the plaything of his imagination. He ap- 
pears to have been all the characters, and in all the situations 
he describes. It is as if either he had had all their feelings, or 
had lent them all his genius to express themselves. There can- 
not be stronger instances of this than Hotspur's rage when Henry 
IV. forbids him to speak of Mortimer, his insensibility to all that 
his father and uncle urge to calm him, and his fine abstracted 
apostrophe to honor, " By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap 
to pluck bright honor from the moon," &;c. After all, notwith- 
standing the gallantry, generosity, good temper, and idle freaks 
of the mad-cap Prince of Wales, we should not have been sorry, 
if Northumberland's force had come up in time to decide the 
fate of the battle at Shrewsbury ; at least, we always heartily 
sympathize with Lady Percy's grief, when she exclaims, 

" Had my sweet Harry had but half their numbers. 
To-day might I (hanging on Hotspur's neck) 
Have talked of Monmouth's grave." 

The truth is, that we never could forgive the Prince's treat- 
ment of FalstafF; though, perhaps, Shakspeare knew what was 
best, according to the history, the nature of the times, and of 
the man. We speak only as dramatic critics. Whatever terror 
the French in those days might have of Henry V., yet, to the 
readers of poetry, at present, FalstafF is the better man of the 
two. We think of him, and quote him oftener. 



13S HENRY V. 



HENRT V, 



Henry V. is a very favorite monarch with the English nation, 
and he appears to have been also a favorite with Shakspeare. 
who labors hard to apologise for the actions of the king, by 
showing us the character of the man, as " the king of good fel- 
lows." He scarcely deserves this honor. He was fond of war 
and low company : we know little else of him. He was care- 
less, dissolute, and ambitious ; idle, or doing mischief In pri- 
vate, he seemed to have no idea of the common decencies of 
life, which he subjected to a kind of regal license ; in public 
affairs, he seemed to have no idea of any rule of right or wrong, 
but brute force, glossed over with a little religious hypocrisy and 
archi-episcopal advice. His principles did not change with his 
situation and professions. His adventure on Gadshill was a 
prelude to the affair of Agincourt, only a bloodless one ; Falstaff 
was a puny prompter of violence and outrage, compared with 
the pious and politic Archbishop of Canterbury, who gave the 
king carte blanche, in a genealogical tree of his family, to rob 
and murder in circles of latitude and longitude abroad — to save 
the possessions of the church at home. This appears in the 
speeches in Shakspeare, where the hidden motives that actuate 
princes and their advisers in war and policy are better laid open 
than in speeches from the throne or woolsack. Henry, because 
he did not know how to govern his own kingdom, determined to 
make war upon his neighbors. Because his own title to the 
crown was doubtful, he laid claim to that of France. Because 
he did not know how to exercise the enormous power which had 
just dropped into his hands, to any one good purpose, he imme- 
diately undertook (a cheap and obvious resource of sovereignty) 



HENRY V. 133 



to do all the mischief he could. Even if absolute monarchs 
had the wit to find out objects of laudable ambition, they could 
only "plume up their wills" in adhering to the more sacred 
formula of the royal prerogative, " the right divine of kings to 
govern wrong," because will is only then triumphant when it is 
opposed to the will of others, because the pride of power is only 
then shown, not when it consults the rights and interests of others, 
but when it insults and tramples on all justice and all humanity. 
Henry declares his resolution '' when France is his, to bend it to 
his awe, or break it all to pieces " — a resolution worthy of a 
conqueror, to destroy all that he cannot enslave ; and what adds 
to the joke, he lays all the blame of the consequences of his 
ambition on those who will not submit tamely to his tyranny. 
Such is the history of kingly power, from the beginning to the 
end of the world ; with this difference, that the object of war 
formerly, when the people adhered to their allegiance, was to 
depose kings ; the object latterly, since the people swerved from 
their allegiance, has been to restore kings, and to make common 
cause against mankind. The object of our late invasion and 
conquest of France was to restore the legitimate monarch, the 
descendant of Hugh Capet, to the throne : Henry V., in his 
time, made war on and deposed the descendant of this very 
Hugh Capet, on the plea that he was a usurper and illegitimate. 
What would the great modern catspaw of legitimacy, and re- 
storer of divine right, have said to the claim of Henry, and the 
title of the descendants of Hugh Capet ? Henry V., it is true, 
was a hero, a king of England, and the conqueror of the king 
of France. Yet, we feel little love or admiration for him. He 
was a hero ; that is, he was ready to sacrifice his own life for 
the pleasure of destroying thousands of other lives : he was a 
king of England, but not a constitutional one, and we only like 
kings according to the law ; lastly, he was a conqueror of the 
French king, and for this we dislike him less than if he had 
conquered the French people. How then do we like him ? We 
like him in the play. There he is a very amiable monster, a 
very splendid pageant. As we like to gaze at a panther, or a 
young lion, in their cages in the Tower, and catch a pleasing 
horror from their glistening eyes, their velvet paws, and dreadful 



ISt HENRY V, 



roar, so we take a very romantic, heroic, patriotic, and poetical 
delight in the boasts and feats of our younger Harry, as they 
appear on the stage, and are confined to lines of ten syllables ; 
where no blood follows the stroke that wounds our ears, where 
no harvest bends beneath horses' hoofs, no city flames, no little 
child is butchered, no dead men's bodies are found piled on 
heaps and festering the next morning — in the orchestra ! 

So much for the politics of this play ; now for the poetry. 
Perhaps one of the most striking images in all Shakspeare is 
that given of war in the first lines of the Prologue. 

" for a muse of fire that would ascend 
The brightest heaven of invention, 
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act. 
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene ! 
Then should the vk^arlike Harry, like himself. 
Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels 
Leash' d in, like hounds ^ should famine y sword, and fire* 
Crouch for employment." 

Rubens, if he had painted it, would not have improved upon 
this simile. 

The conversation between the Archbishop of Canterbury and 
Uie Bishop of Ely, relating to the sudden change in the manners 
of Henry V., is among the well-known Beauties of Shakspeare. 
It is indeed admirable both for strength and grace. It has some- 
times occurred to us that Shakspeare, in describing " the reforma- 
tion " of the prince, might have had an eye to himself — 

" Which is a wonder how his grace should glean it, 

Since his addiction was to courses vain 

His companies unletter'd, rude and shallow. 

His hours fill'd up with riots, banquets, sports ; 

And never noted in him any study. 

Any retirement, any sequestration 

From open haunts and popularity. 

Ely. The strawberry grows underneath the nettle, 
And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best 
Neighbor' d by fruit of baser quality : 
And so the prince obscur'd his contemplation 
TJnder the veil of wildness. which no doubt 



HENRY V. tU 



Grew like the summer-grass, fastest by night, 
Unseen, yet crescive in his faculty." 

This at least is as probable an account of the progress of the 
poet's mind as we have met with in any of the Essays on the 
Learning of Shakspeare. 

Nothing can be better managed than the caution which the 
king gives the meddling archbishop, not to advise him rashly to 
engage in the war with France, his scrupulous dread of the 
consequences of that advice, and his eager desire to hear and 
follow it. 

" And God forbid, my dear and faithful lord, 
That you should fashion, wrest, or bow your reading, 
Or nicely charge your understanding soul 
With opening titles miscreate, whose right 
Suits not in native colors with the truth, 
For God doth know how many now in health 
Shall drop their blood, in approbation 
Of what your reverence shall incite us to. 
Therefore take heed how you impawn your person. 
How you awake our sleeping sword of war ; 
We charge you in the name of God, take heed. 
For never two such kingdoms did contend 
Without much fall of blood, whose guiltless drops 
Are every one a wo, a sore complaint 
'Gainst him, whose wrong gives edge unto the swords 
That make such waste in brief mortality. 
Under this conjuration, speak, my lord ; 
For we will hear, note, and believe in heart. 
That what you speak, is in your conscience wash'd. 
As pure as sin with baptism." 

Another characteristic instance of the blindness of human 
nature to everything but its own interests is the complaint made 
by the king of " the ill-neighborhood " of the Scot in attacking 
England when she was attacking France. 

" For once the eagle England being in prey, 
To her unguarded nest the weazel Scot 
Comes sneaking, and so sucks her princely eggs. 



136 HENRY V. 



It is worth observing that in all these plays, which give an 
admirable picture of the spirit of the good old times, the moral 
inference does not at all depend upon the nature of the actions, 
but on the dignity or meanness of the persons committing them. 
" The eagle England " has a right " to be in prey," but *' the 
weazel Scot " has none " to come sneaking to her nest," which 
she has left to pounce upon others. Might was right, without 
equivocation or disguise, in that heroic and chivalrous age. 
The substitution of right for might, even in theory, is among 
the refinements and abuses of modern philosophy. 

A more beautiful rhetorical delineation of the effects of sub- 
ordination in a commonwealth can hardly be conceived than the 
following : — 

" For government, though high and low and lower, 
Put into parts, doth keep in one consent, 
Congruing in a full and natural close. 
Like music. 

Therefore heaven doth divide 

The state of man in divers functions, 

Setting endeavor in continual motion ; 

To which is fixed, as an aim or butt. 

Obedience : for so work the honey bees ; 

Creatures that by a rule in nature, teach 

The art of order to a peopled kingdom. 

They have a king, and officers of sorts 

Where some, like magistrates, correct at home ; 

Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad ; 

Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings. 

Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds ; 

Which pillage they with merry march bring home 

To the tent-royal of their emperor ; 

Who, busied in his majesty, surveys 

The singing mason building roofs of gold. 

The civil citizens kneading up the honey. 

The poor mechanic porters crowding in 

Their heavy burthens at his narrow gate ; 

The sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum. 

Delivering o'er to executors pale 

The lazy yawning drone. I this infer. 

That many things, having full reference 

To one consent, may work contrariously ; 

As many arrows, loosed several ways. 



HENRY V. 137 



Come to one mark ; as many ways meet in one town ; 
As many fresh streams meet in one salt sea ; 
As many lines close in the dial's centre ; 
So may a thousand actions, once a-foot, 
End in one purpose, and be all well borne 
Without defeat." 

Henry V. is but one of Shakspeare's second-rate plays. Yet 
by quoting passages, like this, from his second-rate plays alone, 
we might make a volume " rich with his praise," 

" As is the oozy bottom of the sea 
With sunken wrack and sumless treasuries." 

Of this sort are the king's remonstrance to Scroop, Grey, and 
Cambridge, on the detection of their treason, his address to the 
soldiers at the siege of Harfleur, and the still finer one before 
the battle of Agincourt, the description of the night before the 
battle, and the reflections on ceremony put into the mouth of 
the king. 

" hard condition ; twin-born with greatness. 
Subjected to the breath of every fool, 
Whose sense no more can feel but his own wringing ! 
What infinite heart's ease must kings neglect. 
That private men enjoy ! and what have kings. 
That privates have not too, save ceremony ? 
Save general ceremony .' 
And what art thou, thou idol ceremony ? 
What kind of god art thou, that suffer' st more 
Of mortal griefs, than do thy worshippers ? 
What are thy rents ? what are thy comings-in ? 
ceremony, show me but thy worth ! 
What is thy soul, O adoration ? 
Art thou aught else but place, degree, and form. 
Creating awe and fear in other men ? 
Wherein thou art less happy, being feared. 
Than they in fearing. 

What drink'st thou oft, instead of homage sweet, 
But poison'd flattery .' 0, be sick, great greatness. 
And bid thy ceremony give thee cure ! 
Think'st thou, the fiery fever will go out 
With titles blown from adulation ? 



138 HENRY V. 



Will it give place to flexure and low bending ! 

Can'st thou, when thou command'st the beggar's knee, 

Command the health of it ? No, thou proud dream, 

That play'st so subtly with a king's repose, 

I am a king, that find thee : and I know, 

'Tis not the balm, the sceptre, and the ball, 

The sword, the mace, the crown imperial. 

The inter-tissu'd robe of gold and pearl. 

The farsed title running 'fore the king, 

The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp 

That beats upon the shore of the world : 

No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony : 

Not all these, laid in bed majestical. 

Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave ; 

Who with a body fill'd, and vacant mind. 

Gets him to rest, cramm'd with distressful bread, 

Never sees horrid night, the child of hell : 

But, like a lacquey, from the rise to set. 

Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night 

Sleeps in Elysium ; next day, after dawn. 

Doth rise, and help Hyperion to his horse ; 

And follows so the ever-running year 

With profitable labor, to his grave : 

And, but for ceremony, such a wretch. 

Winding up days with toil, and nights with sleep, 

Has the forehand and vantage of a king. 

The slave, a member of the country's peace, 

Enjoys it ; but in gross brain little wots 

What watch the king keeps to maintain the peace, 

Whose hours the peasant best advantages." 

Most of these passages are well known : there is one, which 
we do not remember to have seen noticed, and yet it is no whit 
inferior to the rest in heroic beauty. It is the account of the 
deaths of York and Suffolk. 

" Exeter. The Duke of York commends him to your majesty. 

K. Henry, Lives he, good uncle .' Thrice within this hour 
I saw him down ; thrice up again, and fighting ; 
From helmet to the spur all blood he was. 

Exeter. In which array (brave soldier) doth he lie, 
Larding the plain : and by his bloody side 
(Yoke-fellow to his honor-owing wounds) 
The noble Earl of Suffolk also lies. 
Suffolk first died : and York, all haggled o'er. 



HENRY V. 



Comes to him, where in gore he lay insteep'd, 

And takes him by the beard ; kisses the gashes, 

That bloodily did yawn upon his face ; 

And cries aloud — Tarry, dear cousin Suffolk/ 

J\fy soul shall thine keep company to heaven : 

Tarry, sweet soul, for mine, then fly a-hreast ; 

As in this glorious and well-foughten field y 

We kept together in our chivalry ! 

Upon these words I came, and cheer'd him up : 

He smil'd me in the face, caught me by th' hand. 

And, with a feeble gripe, says — Bear my lord. 

Commend my service to my sovereign. 

So did he turn, and over Suffolk's neck 

He threw his wounded arm, and kiss'd his lips ; 

And so, espous'd to death, with blood he seal'd 

A testament of noble-ending love." 

But we must have done with splendid quotations. The be- 
havior of the king, in the difficult and doubtful circumstances 
in which he is placed, is as patient and modest as it is spirited 
and lofty in his prosperous fortune. The character of the 
French nobles is also very admirably depicted ; and the Dau- 
phin's praise of his horse shows the vanity of that class of per- 
sons in a very striking point of view. Shakspeare always ac- 
companies a foolish prince with a satirical courtier, as we see in 
this instance. The comic parts of Henry V. are very inferior 
to those of Henry IV. FalstafF is dead, and without him, Pis- 
tol, Nym, and Bardolph, are satellites without a sun. Fluellen 
the Welshman is the most entertaining character in the piece. 
He is good-natured, brave, choleric, and pedantic. His parallel 
between Alexander and Harry of Monmouth, and his desire to 
have " some disputations " with Captain Macmorris on the disci- 
pline of the Roman wars, in the heat of the battle, are never to 
be forgotten. His treatment of Pistol is as good as Pistol's 
treatment of his French prisoner. There are two other re- 
markable prose passages in this play : the conversation of Henry 
in disguise with the three sentinels on the duties of a soldier, 
and his courtship of Katherine in broken French. We like 
them both exceedingly, though the first savors perhaps too much 
of the king, and the last too little of the lover. 



140 HENRY VI. 



HENRY VI. 



IN THREE PARTS 



During the time of the civil wars of York and Lancaster, 
England was a perfect bear-garden, and Shakspeare has given 
us a very lively picture of the scene. The three parts of 
Henry VI. convey a picture of very little else ; and are inferior 
to the other historical plays. They have brilliant passages ; but 
the general ground-work is comparatively poor and meagre, the 
style " flat and unraised." There are few lines like the follow- 
ing : 

" Glory is like a circle in the water ; 

Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself, 

Till by broad spreading it disperse to naught." 

The first part relates to the wars in France after the death of 
Henry V., and the story of the Maid of Orleans. She is here 
almost as scurvily treated, as in Voltaire's Pucelle. Talbot is 
a very magnificent sketch : there is something as formidable in 
this portrait of him, as there would be in a monumental figure of 
him or in the sight of the armor which he wore. The scene in 
which he visits the Countess of Auvergne, who seeks to entrap 
him, is a very spirited one ; and his description of his own treat- 
ment, while a prisoner to the French, not less remarkable. 

Salisbury. Yet tell'st thou not, how thou wert entertain'd. 
Talbot. With scoffs and scorns, and contumelious taunts, 

In open market-place produced they me. 

To be a public spectacle to all. 



HENRY VI, 141 



Here, said they, is the terror of the French, 

The scarecrow that affrights our children so. 

Then broke I from the officers that led me. 

And with my nails digg'd stones out of the ground. 

To hurl at the beholders of my shame. 

My grisly countenance made others fly. 

None durst come near for fear of sudden death. 

In iron walls they deem'd me not secure : 

So great a fear my name amongst them spread. 

That they suppos'd I could rend bars of steely 

And spurn in pieces posts of adamant. 

Wherefore a guard of chosen shot I had: 

They walk'd about me every minute-while ; 

And if I did but stir out of my bed. 

Ready they were to shoot me to the heart." 

The second part relates chiefly to the contests between the 
nobles during the minority of Henry, and the death of Glouces- 
ter, the good Duke Humphrey. The character of Cardinal 
Beaufort is the most prominent of the group : the account of his 
death is one of our author's master-pieces. So is the speech of 
Gloucester to the nobles on the loss of the provinces of France 
by the king's marriage with Margaret of Anjou. The preten- 
sions and growing ambition of the Duke of York, the father of 
Richard III., are also very ably developed. Among the episodes, 
the tragi-comedy of Jack Cade, and the detection of the impos- 
tor Simcox, are truly edifying. 

The third part describes Henry's loss of his crown : his death 
takes place in the last act, which is usually thrust into the com- 
mon acting play of Richard III. The character of Gloucester, 
afterwards King Richard, is here very powerfully commenced, 
and his dangerous designs and long-aching ambition are fully 
described in his soliloquy in the third act, beginning, " Ay, Ed- 
ward will use women honorably." Henry VI. is drawn as dis- 
tinctly as his high-spirited Queen, and notwithstanding the very 
mean figure which Henry makes as a king, we still feel more 
respect for him than for his wife. 

We have already observed that Shakspeare was scarcely more 
remarkable for the force and marked contrasts of his characters, 
than for the truth and subtlety with which he has distinguished 
those which approached the nearest to each other. For instance, 



142 HENRY VI. 



the soul of Othello is hardly more distinct from that of lago than 
that of Desdemona is shown to be from ^Emilia's ; the ambition 
of Macbeth is as distinct from the ambition of Richard III. as it 
is from the meekness of Duncan ; the real madness of Lear is 
as different from the feigned madness of Edgar* as from the 
babbling of the fool ; the contrast between wit and folly in Fal- 
staff and Shallow is not more characteristic though more obvious 
than the gradations of folly, loquacious or reserved, in Shallow 
and Silence ; and again, the gallantry of Prince Henry is as 
little confounded with that of Hotspur as with the cowardice of 
FalstafF, or as the sensual and philosophic cowardice of the Knight 
is with the pitiful and cringing cowardice of ParoUes. All these 
several personages were as different in Shakspeare as they 
would have been in themselves : his imagination borrowed from 
the life, and every circumstance, object, motive, passion, operat.. 
ed there as it would in reality, and produced a world of men 
and women as distinct, as true, and as various as those that ex- 
ist in nature. The peculiar property of Shakspeare's imagina- 
tion was his truth, accompanied with the unconsciousness of na- 
ture : indeed, imagination to be perfect must be unconscious, at 
least in production ; for nature is so. We shall attempt one ex- 
ample more in the characters of Richard H. and Henry VI. 

The characters and situations of both these persons were so 
nearly alike, that they would have been completely confounded 
by a common-place poet. Yet they are kept quite distinct in 
Shakspeare. Both were kings, and both unfortunate. Both lost 
their crowns owing to their mismanagement and imbecility ; the 
one from a thoughtless, wilful abuse of power, the other from an 
indifference to it. The manner in which they bear their misfor- 
tunes corresponds exactly to the causes which led to them. 
The one is always lamenting the loss of his power, which he 
has not the spirit to regain ; the other seems only to regret that 
he had ever been king, and is glad to be rid of the power, with 
the trouble : the effeminacy of the one is that of a voluptuary, 



* There is another instance of the same distinction in Hamlet and 
Ophelia. Hamlet's pretended madness would make a very good real mad- 
ness in any other author. 



HENRY VI. 143 



proud, revengeful, impatient of contradiction, and inconsolable 
in his misfortunes ; the effeminacy of the other is that of an 
indolent, good-natured mind, naturally averse to the turmoils of 
ambition and the cares of greatness, and who wishes to pass his 
time in monkish indolence and contemplation. Richard bewails 
the loss of the kingly power only as it was the means of grati- 
fying his pride and luxury ; Henry regards it only as a means 
of doing right, and is less desirous of the advantages to be de- 
rived from possessing it than afraid of exercising it wrong. In 
knighting a young soldier, he gives him ghostly advice — 

" Edward Plantagenet, arise a knight, 
And learn this lesson, draw thy sword in right." 

Richard II., in the first speeches of the play, betrays his real 
character. In the first alarm of his pride, on hearing of Boling- 
broke's rebellion, before his presumption has met with any 
check, he exclaims — 

" Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords : 
This earth shall have a feeling, and these stones, 
Prove armed soldiers, ere her native king 
Shall faulter under proud rebellious arms. 

Not all the water in the rough rude sea 

Can wash the balm from an anointed king ; 

The breath of worldly man cannot depose 

The Deputy elected by the Lord, 

For every man that Bolingbroke hath prest. 

To lift sharp steel against our golden crown. 

Heaven for his Richard hath in heavenly pay 

A glorious angel ; then if angels fight. 

Weak men must fall ; for Heaven still guards the right." 

Yet, notwithstanding this royal confession of faith, on the very 
first news of actual disaster, all his conceit of himself as the 
peculiar favorite of Providence vanishes into air. 

" But now the blood of twenty thousand men 
Did triumph in my face, and they are fled. 
All souls that will be safe fly from my side,; 
For time hath set a blot upon my pride." 



144 HENRY VI. 



Immediately after, however, recollecting that " cheap de- 
fence" of the divinity of kings which is to be found in opinion, 
he is for arming his nam.e against his enemies. 

" Awake, thou coward Majesty, thou sleep'st ; 
Is not the King's name forty thousand names ? 
Arm, arm, my name ; a puny subject strikes 
At thy great glory !" 

King Henry does not make any such vaporing resistance to 
the loss of his crown, but lets it slip from off his head as a 
weight which he is neither able nor willing to bear ; stands qui- 
etly by to see the issue of the contest for his kingdom, as if it 
were a game at push-pin, and is pleased when the odds prove 
against him. 

When Richard first hears of the death of his favorites, Bushy, 
Bagot, and the rest, he indignantly rejects all idea of any further 
efforts, and only indulges in the extravagant impatience of his 
grief and his despair, in that fine speech which has been so often 
quoted : — 

" AuMERLE, Where is the duke my father, with his power ? 

K. Richard. No matter where : of comfort no man speak : 
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs. 
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes 
Write sorrow in the bosom of the earth ! 
Let's choose executors, and talk of wills : 
And yet not so — for what can we bequeath, 
Save our deposed bodies to the ground ? 
Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke's, 
And nothing can we call our own but death, 
And that small model of the barren earth, 
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones. 
For heaven's sake let us sit upon the ground, 
And tell sad stories of the death of kings : 
How some have been depos'd, some slain in war ; 
Some haunted by the ghosts they dispossess'd ; 
Some poison'd by their wives, some sleeping kill'd ; 
All murder'd : — for within the hollow crown. 
That rounds the mortal temples of a king, 
Keeps death his court : and there the antic sits, 
Scoffing his state, and grinning at his pomp ! 



HENRY VI. 145 



Allowing him a breath, a little scene 

To monarchize, be fear'd, and kill with looks ; 

Infusing him with self and vain conceit — 

As if this flesh, which walls about our life. 

Were brass impregnable : and humor'd thus, 

Comes at the last, and, with a little pin. 

Bores through his castle wall, and — farewell king ! 

Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood 

With solemn reverence ; throw away respect, 

Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty. 

For you have but mistook me all this while : 

I live on bread like you, feel want, taste grief, 

Need friends, like you ; — subjected thus. 

How can you say to me — I am a king ?" 

There is as little sincerity afterwards in his affected resigna- 
tion to his fate, as there is fortitude in this exaggerated picture 
of his misfortunes before they have happened. 

When Northumberland comes back with the message from 
Bolingbroke, he exclaims, anticipating the result, — 

" What must the king do now ? Must he submit ? 
The king shall do it : must he be depos'd ? 
The king shall be contented : must he lose 
The name of king ? 0' God's name let it go. 
I'll give my jewels for a set of beads ; 
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage ; 
My gay apparel for an alm's-man's gown ; 
My figur'd goblets for a dish of wood ; 
My sceptre for a palmer's walking staff"; 
My subjects for a pair of carved saints, 
And my large kingdom for a little grave — 
A little, little grave, an obscure grave." 

How differently is all this expressed in King Henry's soliloquy 
during the battle with Edward's party : — 

" This battle fares like to the morning's war. 
When dying clouds contend with growing light, 
What time the shepherd blowing of his nails, 
Can neither call it perfect day or night. 
Here on this mole-hill will I sit me down ; 
To whom God will, there be the victory ! 
For Margaret my Queen and Clifford too 
11 



MS HENRY VI. 



Have chid me from the battle, swearing both 

They prosper best of all when I am thence. 

Would I were dead, if God's good will were so, 

For what is in this world but grief and wo ? 

God ! methinks it were a happy life 

To be no better than a homely swain, 

To sit upon a hill as I do now, 

To carve out dials quaintly, point by point, 

Thereby to see the minutes how they run : 

How many make the hour full complete. 

How many hours bring about the day, 

How many days will finish up the year. 

How many years a mortal man may live. 

When this is known, then to divide the times : 

So many hours must I tend my flock. 

So many hours must I take my rest, 

So many hours must I contemplate. 

So many hours must I sport myself; 

So many days my ewes have been with young. 

So many weeks ere the poor fools will yean, 

So many months ere I shall shear the fleece : 

So many minutes, hours, weeks, months, and years 

Past over, to the end they were created. 

Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave. 

Ah ! what a life were this ! how sweet, how lovely 

Gives not the hawthorn bush a sweeter shade 

To shepherds looking on their silly sheep, 

Than doth a rich embroidered canopy 

To kings that fear their subjects' treachery .' 

yes it doth, a thousand-fold it doth, 

And to conclude, the shepherd's homely curds, 

His cold thin drink out of his leather bottle. 

His wonted sleep under a fresh tree's shade. 

All which secure and sweetly he enjoys, 

Is far beyond a prince's delicates. 

His viands sparkling in a golden cup, 

His body couched in a curious bed, 

Where care, mistrust, and treasons w^ait on him." 



This is a true and beautiful description of a naturally quiet 
and contented disposition, and not, like the former, the splenetic 
effusion of disappointed ambition. 

In the last scene of Richard II. his despair lends him courage : 
he beats the keeper, slays two of his assassins, and dies with im- 



HENRY Vr. 147 



precations in his mouth against Sir Pierce Exton, who " had 
staggered his royal person." Henry, when he is seized by the 
deer-stealers, only reads them a moral lecture on the duty of 
allegiance and the sanctity of an oath ; and when stabbed by 
Gloucester in the Tower, reproaches him with his crimes, but 
pardons him his own death. 



148 RICHARD III. 



EICHARD III. 



Richard III. may be considered as properly a stage-play : it be- 
longs to the theatre, rather than to the closet. We shall there- 
fore criticise it chiefly with a reference to the manner in which 
we have seen it performed. It is the character in which Garrick 
came out : it was the second character in which Mr. Kean ap- 
peared, and in which he acquired his fame. Shakspeare we have 
always with us : actors we have only for a few seasons ; and 
therefore some account of them may be acceptable, if not to our 
contemporaries, to those who come after us, if " that rich and 
idle personage, Posterity," should deign to look into our writings. 

It is possible to form a higher conception of the character of 
Richard than that given by Mr. Kean (not from seeing any 
other actor, but from reading Shakspeare) ; but we cannot ima- 
gine any character represented with greater distinctness and pre- 
cision, more perfectly articulated in every part. Perhaps indeed 
there is too much of v/hat is technically called execution. 
When we first saw this celebrated actor in the part, we thought 
he sometimes failed from an exuberance of manner, and dissipated 
the impression of the character by the variety of his resources. 
To be perfect his delineation of it should have a little more soli- 
dity, depth, sustained and impassioned feeling, with somewhat 
less brilliancy, with fewer glancing lights, pointed transitions, 
and pantomimic evolutions. 

The Richard of Shakspeare is towering and lofty ; equally 
impetuous and commanding ; haughty, violent, and subtle ; bold 
and treacherous ; confident in his strength as well as in his cun- 
ning j raised high by his birth, and higher by his genius and his 
crimes; a royal usurper, a princely hypocrite, a tyrant and a 
murderer of the house of Plantagenet. 



RICHARD III. 149 



" Bnt I was born so high : 

Our aery buildeth in the cedar's top, 

And dallies with the wind, and scorns the sun." 



Tlie idea conveyed in these lines (which are indeed omitted in 
the miserable medley acted for Richard III.) is never lost sight of 
by Shakspeare, and should not be out of the actor's mind for a 
moment. The restless and sanguinary Richard is not a man 
striving to be great, but to be greater than he is ; conscious of his 
strength of will, his power of intellect, his daring courage, his 
elevated station ; and making use of these advantages as giving 
him both the means and the pretext to commit unheard-of crimes, 
and to shield himself from remorse and infamy. 

If Mr. Kean does not entirely succeed in concentrating all the 
lines of the character, as drawn by Shakspeare, he gives an anit 
mation, vigor, and relief to the part which we have never seen 
surpassed. He is more refined than Cooke; more bold, varied, 
and original than Kemble in the same character. In some parts 
he is deficient in dignity, and, particularly in the scenes of state 
business, he has by no means an air of artificial authority. 
There is at times a sort of tip-toe elevation, an enthusiastic rap- 
ture in his expectations of attaining the crown, and at others a 
gloating expression of sullen delight, as if he already clenched 
the bauble, and held it in his grasp. This was the precise ex- 
pression which Mr. Kean gave with so much effect to the part 
where he says, that he already feels " The golden rigol bind his 
brows." In one who dares so much, there is indeed little to 
blame. The courtship scene with Lady Anne is an admirable 
exhibition of smooth and smiling villainy. The progress of wily 
adulation, of encroaching humility, is finely marked by his ac- 
tion, voice and eye. He seems, like the first Tempter, to ap- 
proach his prey, secure of the event, and as if success had 
smoothed his way before him. Mr. Cooke's manner of repre- 
senting this scene was more vehement, hurried, and full of anx- 
ious uncertainty. This, though more natural in general, was less 
in character in this particular instance. Richard should woo 
not as a lover but as an actor — to show his mental superiority, 
and powe^c of making others the playthings of his will. Mr. 



150 KICHARD III. 



Kean's attitude in leaning against the side of the stage before he 
comes forward to address Lady Anne, is one of the most grace- 
ful and striking ever witnessed on the stage. It would have done 
for Titian to paint. The frequent and rapid transition of his voice 
from the expression of the fiercest passion to the most familiar 
tones of conversation was that which gave a peculiar grace of 
novelty to his acting on his first appearance. This has been 
since imitated and caricatured by others, and he himself uses the 
artifice more sparingly than he did. His bye-play is excellent. 
His manner of bidding his friends " Good night," after pausing 
with the point of his sword, drawn slowly backward and forward 
on the ground, as if considering the plan of the battle next day, is 
a particularly happy and natural thought. He gives to the two 
last acts of the play the greatest animation and effect. He fills 
every part of the stage ; and makes up for the deficiency of his per- 
son by what has been sometimes objected to as an excess of action. 
The concluding scene, in which he is killed by Richmond, is the 
most brilliant of the whole. He fights at last like one drunk with 
wounds ; and the attitude in Avhich he stands with his hands 
stretched out, after his sword is wrested from him, has a preter- 
natural and terrific grandeur, as if his will could not be disarm- 
ed, and the very phantoms of his despair had Avithering power to 
kill. — Mr. Kean has since in a great measure elTacpd the impres- 
sion of his Richard III. by the superior efforts of his genius in 
Othello (his master-piece), in the murder-scene in Macbeth, in 
Richard II., in Sir Giles Overreach, and lastly in Oroonoko ; but 
we still like to look back to his first performance of this part, 
both because it first assured his admirers of his future success, 
and because we bore our feeble but, at that time, not useless tes- 
timony to the merits of this very original actor, on which the 
town was considerably divided for no other reason than because 
they were original. 

The manner in which Shakspeare's plays have been generally 
altered or rather mangled by modern mechanists, is a disgrace 
to the English stage. The patch-work Richard III. which is 
acted under the sanction of his name, and which was manu- 
factured by Gibber, is a striking example of this remark. 

The play itself is undoubtedly a very powerful effusion of 



RICHARD III. 151 

Shakspeare's genius. The ground-work of the character of 
Richard, that mixture of intellectual vigor with moral depravity 
in which Shakspeare delighted to show his strength, gave full scope 
as well as temptation to the exercise of his imagination. The cha- 
racter of his hero is almost everywhere predominant, and marks 
its lurid track throughout. The original play is however too 
long for representation, and there are some few scenes which 
might be better spared than preserved, and by omitting which it 
would remain a complete whole. The only rule, indeed, for 
altering Shakspeare is to retrench certain passages which may 
be considered either as superfluous or obsolete, but not to add 
or transpose anything. The arrangement and development of 
the story, and the mutual centrast and combination of the dra- 
matis personce, are in general as finely managed as the develop- 
ment of the characters or the expression of the passions. 

This rule has not been adhered to in the present instance. 
Some of the most important and striking passages in the princi- 
pal character have been omitted, to make room for idle and mis- 
placed extracts from other plays ; the only intention of which 
seems to have been to make the character of Richard as odious 
and disgusting as possible. It is apparently for no other purpose 
than to make Gloucester stab King Henry on the stage, that the 
fine abrupt introduction of the character in the opening of the 
play is lost in the tedious whining morality of the uxorious kinir 
(taken from another play) ; we say tedious, because'it interrupts 
the business of the scene, and loses its beauty and effect by 
having no intelligible connection with the previous character of 
the mild, well-meaning monarch. The passages which the unfor- 
tunate Henry has to recite are beautiful and pathetic in them- 
selves, but they have nothing to do with the world that Richard 
lias to "bustle in."' In the same spirit of vulgar caricature is 
the scene between Richard and Lady Anne (when his wife) in- 
terpolated without any authority, merely to gratify this favorite 
propensity to disgust and loathing. With the same perverse 
consistency, Richard, after his last fatal struggle, is raised up 
by some Galvanic process, to utter the imprecation, without any 
motive but pure malignity, which Shakspeare has so properly 
put into the mouth of Northumberland on hearing of Percy's 



152 RICHARD III. 



death. To make room for these worse than needless additions, 
many of the most striking passages in the real play have been 
omitted by the foppery and ignorance of the prompt-book critics. 
We do not mean to insist merely on passages which are fine as 
poetry and to the reader, such as Clarence's dream, &c., but 
on those which are important to the understanding of the cha- 
racter, and peculiarly adapted for stage effect. We will give 
the following as instances among several others. The first is 
the scene where Richard enters abruptly to the queen and her 
friends to defend himself: — 

"Gloucester. They do me wrong, and I will not endure it. 
Who are they that complain unto the king, 
That I forsooth am stern, and love them not? 
By holy Paul, they love his grace but lightly, 
That fill his ears with such dissensions rumors : 
Because I cannot flatter and look fair, 
Smile in men's faces, smooth, deceive, and cog. 
Duck with French nods, and apish courtesy, 
I must be held a rancorous enemy. 
Cannot a plain man live, and think no harm, 
But thus his simple truth must be abus'd 
With silken, sly, insinuating Jacks ? 

Gray. To whom in all this presence speaks your grace ? 

Gloucester. To thee, that hast nor honesty nor grace ? 
When have I injur'd thee, when done thee wrong ? 
Or thee ? or thee ? or any of your faction .' 
A plague upon you all !" 

Nothing can be more characteristic than the turbulent preten- 
sions to meekness and simplicity in this address. Again, the 
versatility and adroitness of Richard is admirably described in 
the following ironical conversation with Brakenbury : — 

" Brakenbury. I beseech your graces both to pardon me. 
His Majesty hath straitly given in charge, 
That no man shall have private conference, 
Of what degree soever, with your brother. 

Gloucester. ■ E'en so, and please your worship, Brakenbury, 
You may partake of anything we say : 
We speak no treason, man — we say the king 
Is wise and virtuous, and his noble queen 
Well strook in years, fair, and not jealous. 
We say that Shore's wife hath a pretty foot, 



RICHARD m. 153 



A cherry lip, a passing pleasing tongue ; 
That the queen's kindred are made gentlefolks, 
How say you, sir ? Can you deny all this ? 

Brakenbury. With this, my lord, myself have naught to do. 

Gloucester. What, fellow, naught to do with mistress Shore ? 
I tell you, sir, he that doth naught with her. 
Excepting one, were best to do it secretly alone. 

Brakeistbury. What one, my lord ? 

Gloucester. Her husband, knave — would'st thou betray me ?"' 

The feigned reconciliation of Gloucester with the queen's 
kinsmen is also a master-piece. One of the finest strokes in the 
play, and which serves to show as much as anything the deep, 
plausible manners of Richard, is the unsuspecting security of 
Hastings, at the very time when the former is plotting his death, 
and when that very appearance of cordiality and good humor 
on which Hastings builds his confidence arises from Richard's 
consciousness of having betrayed him to his ruin. This, with 
the whole character of Hastings, is omitted. 

Perhaps the two most beautiful passages in the original play 
are the farewell apostrophe of the queen to the Tower, where 
her children are shut up from her, and Tyrrei's description of 
their death. We will finish our quotations with them. 

" Queen-. Stay, yet look back with me unto the Tower; 
Pity, you ancient stones, those tender babes, 
Whom envy hath immured within your walls ; 
Rough cradle for such little pretty ones. 
Rude, rugged nurse, old sullen play-fellow, 
For tender princes !" 

The other passage is the account of their death by Tyrrel : — 

" Dighton and Forrest, whom I did suborn 
To do this piece of ruthless butchery. 
Albeit they were flesh'd villains, bloody dogs, 
Wept like to children in their death's sad story : 
thus ! quoth Dighton, lay the gentle babes ; 
Thus, thus, quoth Forrest, girdling one another 
Within their innocent alabaster arms ; 
Their lips were four red roses on a stalk. 
And in that summer beauty kissed each other ; 
A book of prayers on their pillow lay. 



154 RICHARD III. 



Which once, quoth Forrest, almost changed my mind. 
But oh the devil ! — there the villain stopped ; 
When Dighton thus told on — we smothered 
The most replenished sweet work of nature. 
That from the prime creation e'er she framed." 

These are some of those wonderful bursts of feeling, done to 
the life, to the very height of fancy and nature, which our 
Shakspeare alone could give. We do not insist on the repetition 
of these last passages as proper for the stage : we should indeed 
be loth to trust them in the mouth of almost any actor : but we 
should wish them to be retained in preference at least to the 
fantoccini exhibition of the young princes, Edward and York, 
bandying childish wit with their uncle. 

The introduction of the ghosts through the trap-doors of the 
stage should be altogether omitted. The speeches which they 
address to Richard might be delivered just as well from behind 
the scenes. These sort of exhibitions might have been very 
proper for a superstitious age, but in an age not superstitious 
thev excite ridicule instead of terror. 



HENRY VIII. iri5 



HENRY VIII 



This play contains little action or violence of passion, yet it has 
considerable interest of a more mild and tliouglitful cast, and 
some of the most striking passages in the author's works. The 
character of Queen Kathcrine is the most perfect delineation of 
matronly dignity, sweetness, and resignation, that can be con- 
ceived. Her appeals to the protection of the king, her remon- 
strances to the cardinals, her conversations Vvith her women, show 
a noble and generous spirit accompanied with the utmost n-entle- 
ness of nature. What can be more affecting than her answer 
to Campeius and Wolsey, who come to visit her as pretended 
friends ? 

-" Nay, forsooth, my friends, 



They that my trust must grow to, live not here ; 
They are, as all my comforts are, far hence, 
In my own country, lords." 

Dr. Johnson observes of this play, that '-'the meek sorrows 
and virtuous distresses of Katherine have furnished some scenes, 
which may be justly numbered among the greatest efforts of 
tragedy. But the genius of Shakspeare comes in and goes out 
with Katherine. Every other part may be easily conceived and 
easily written." This is easily said ; but with all due deference 
to so great a reputed authority as that of Johnson, it is not true. 
For instance, the scene of Buckingham led to execution is one 
of the most affecting and natural in Shakspeare, and one to 
which there is hardly an approach in any other author. Ao-ain, 
the character of Wolsey, the description of his pride and of his 
fall, are inimitable, and have, besides their crorgeousness of 



56 HENRY VIII. 



effect, a pathos, which only the genius of Shakspeare could lend 
to the distresses of a proud, bad man, like Wolsey. There is a 
sort of child-like simplicity in the very helplessness of his situa- 
tion, arising from the recollection of his past overbearing ambi- 
tion. After the cutting sarcasms of his enemies, on his dis- 
grace, against which he bears up with a spirit conscious of his 
ov/n superiority, he breaks out into that fine apostrophe — 

" Farewell, a long farewell, to all my greatness ! 
This is the state of man ; to-day he puts forth 
The tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms, 
And bears his blushing honors thick upon him ; 
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost ; 
And — when he thinks, good easy man, full surely 
His greatness is a ripening — nips his root. 
And then he falls, as I do, I have ventur'd, 
Like little w^anton boys that swim on bladders, 
These many summers in a sea of glory ; 
But far beyond my depth : my high-blown pride 
At length broke under me ; and now has left me, 
Weary and old with service, to the mercy 
Of a rude stream, that must for ever hide me. 
Vain pomp and glory of the world, I hate ye ! 
I feel my heart now open'd : how wretched 
Is that poor man, that hangs on princes' favors ! 
There is betwixt that smile we would aspire to, 
That sweet aspect of princes, and our ruin, 
More pangs and fears than war and women have ; 
And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer, 
Never to hope again !" 

There is in this passage, as well as in the well-known dia- 
logue with Cromwell which follows, something which stretches 
beyond common-place ; nor is the account which Griffiths gives 
of Wolsey's death less Shakspearian ; and the candor with 
which Queen Katherine listens to the praise of " him whom of 
all men while living she hated most" adds the last graceful 
finishing to her character. 

Among other images of great individual beauty might be 
mentioned the description of the effect of Ann Boleyn's present- 
ing herself to the crowd at her coronation. 



HENRY VIII. 157 



While her grace sat down 



To rest awhile, some half an hour or so, 
In a rich chair of state, opposing freely 
The beauty of her person to the people. 
Believe me, sir, she is the goodliest woman 
That ever lay by man. Which when the people 
Had the full view of, such a noise arose 
As the shrouds make at sea in a stiff tempest. 
As loud and to as many tunes" 

The character of Henry VIII. is drawn with great truth and 
spirit. It is like a very disagreeable portrait, sketched by the 
hand of a master. His gross appearance, his blustering 
demeanor, his vulgarity, his arrogance, his sensuality, his 
cruelty, his hypocrisy, his want of common decency and com- 
mon humanity, are marked in strong lines. His traditional 
peculiarities of expression complete the reality of the picture. 
The authoritative expletive, " Ha !" with which he intimates 
his indignation or surprise, has an effect like the first startling 
sound that breaks from a thunder-cloud. He is of all the 
monarchs in our history the most disgusting : for he unites in 
himself all the vices of barbarism and refinement, without their 
virtues. Other kings before him (such as Richard III.) were 
tyrants and murderers out of ambition or necessity : they gained 
or established unjust power by violent means : they destroyed 
their enemies, or those who barred their access to the throne or 
made its tenure insecure. But Henry VIII.'s power is most fatal 
to those whom he loves : he is cruel and remorseless to pamper 
his luxurious appetites ; bloody and voluptuous ; an amorous 
murderer ; an uxorious debauchee. His hardened insensibility 
to the feelings of others is strengthened by the most profligate 
self-indulgence. The religious hypocrisy, under which he 
masks his cruelty and his lust, is admirably displayed in the 
speech in which he describes the first misgivings of his con- 
science and its increasing throes and terrors, which have in- 
duced him to divorce his queen. The only thing in his favor 
in this play is his treatment of Cranmer : there is also another 
circumstance in his favor, which is his patronage of Hans Hol- 
bein. — It has been said of Shakspeare — " No maid could live 



158 HENRY VIII. 



near such a man." It might with as good reason be said — •' No 
king could live near such a man." His eye would have pene- 
trated through the pomp of circumstances and veil of opinion. 
As it is, he has represented such a person to the life — his plays 
are in this respect the glass of history — he has done them the 
same justice as if he had been a privy councillor all his life, and 
in each successive reign. Kings ought never to be seen upon 
the stage. In the abstract, they are very disagreeable chai'ac- 
ters: it is only while living that they are "the best of kings." 
It is their power, their splendor, it is the apprehension of the 
personal consequences of their favor or their hatred, that dazzles 
the imagination and suspends the judgment of their favorites or 
their vassals ; but death cancels the bond of allegiance and of 
interest ; and seen as they ivere, their power and their preten- 
sions look monstrous and ridiculous. The charge brought 
against modern philosophy as inimical to loyalty is unjust, 
because it might as well be brought against other things. No 
reader of history can be a lover of kings. We have often 
wondered that Henry VIII., as he is drawn by Shakspeare, and 
as we have seen him represented in all the bloated deformity 
of mind and person, is not hooted from the English stage. 



KING JOHN. 159 



KING JOHN 



King John is the last of the historical plays we shall have to 
speak of; and we are not sorry that it is. If we are to indulge 
our imaginations, we had rather do it upon an imaginary theme; 
if we are to find subjects for the exercise of our pity and terror, 
we prefer seeking them in fictitious danger and fictitious dis- 
tress. It gives a soreness to our feelings of indignation or sym- 
pathy, when we know that in tracing the progress of sufferings 
and crimes, we are treading upon real ground, and recollect that 
the poet's "dream" denoted a foregone conclusion — irrevocable 
ills, not conjured up by the fancy, but placed beyond the reach 
of poetical justice. That the treachery of King John, the death 
of Arthur, the grief of Constance, had a real truth in history, 
sharpens the sense of pain, while it hangs a leaden weight on 
t!ie heart and the imagination. Something whispers us that we 
have no right to make a mock of calamities like these, or to turn 
the truth of things into the puppet and plaything of our fancies. 
"To consider thus" may be "to consider too curiously ;" but 
still we think that the actual truth of the particular events, in 
proportion as we are conscious of it, is a drawback on the plea- 
sure as well as the dignity of tragedy. 

King John has all the beauties of language and all the rich- 
ness of the imagination to relieve the painfulness of the subject. 
The character of King John himself is kept pretty much in the 
back ground ; it is only marked in by comparatively slight indi- 
cations. The crimes he is tempted to commit are such as are 
thrust upon him rather by circumstances and opportunity than 
of his own seeking : he is here represented as more cowardly 
than cruel, and as more contemptible than odious. The play 
embraces only a part of his history. There are, however, a few 



160 KING JOHN. 



characters on the stage that excite more disgust and loathing. 
He has no intellectual grandeur or strength of character to shield 
him from the indignation which his immediate conduct provokes : 
he stands naked and defenceless, in that respect, to the worst we 
can think of him : and besides, we are impelled to put the very 
worst construction on his meanness and cruelty by the tender 
picture of the beauty and helplessness of the object of it, as well 
as by the frantic and heart-rending pleadings of maternal de- 
spair. We do not forgive him the death of Arthur because he 
had too late revoked his doom and tried to prevent it, and per- 
haps because he has himself repented of his black design, our 
moral sense gains courage to hate him the more for it. We take 
him at his word, and think his purposes must be odious indeed, 
when he himself shrinks back from them. The scene in which 
King John suggests to Hubert the design of murdering his 
nephew, is a master-piece of dramatic skill, but it is still inferior, 
very inferior to the scene between Hubert and Arthur, when the 
latter learns the orders to put out his eyes. If anything ever 
was penned, heart-piercing, mixing the extremes of terror and 
pity, of that which shocks and that which soothes the mind, it is 
this scene. 

Arthur's death afterwards, when he throws himself from his 
prison walls, excites the utmost pity for his innocence and friend- 
less situation, and well justifies the exaggerated denunciations 
of Falconbridge to Hubert, whom he suspects wrongfully of 
the deed. 

" There is not yet so ugly a fiend of hell 
As thou shalt be, if thou did'st kill this child. 
— If thou did'st but consent 
To this most cruel act, do but despair : 
And if thou want'st a cord, the smallest thread 
That ever spider twisted from her womb 
Will strangle thee : a rush will be a beam 
To hang thee on : or would'st thou drown thyself, 
Put but a little water in a spoon, 
And it shall be as all the ocean, 
Enough to stifle such a villain up." 

The excess of maternal tenderness, rendered desperate by the 



KING JOHN. 161 



fickleness of friends and the injustice of fortune, and made 
stronger in will, in proportion to the want of all other power, was 
never more finely expressed than in Constance. The dignity of 
her answer to King Philip, when she refuses to accompany his 
messenger, " To me and to the state of my great grief, let kings 
assemble," her indignant reproach to Austria for deserting her 
cause, her invocation to death, " that love of misery," however 
fine and spirited, all yield to the beauty of the passage, where, 
her passion subsiding into tenderness, she addresses the Cardinal 
in these words : — 

" father Cardinal, I have heard you say 
That we shall see and know our friends in heav'n ; 
If that be, I shall see my boy again. 
For since the birth of Cain, the first male child; 
To him that did but yesterday suspire. 
There was not such a gracious creature born. 
But now will canker-sorrow eat my bud. 
And chase the native beauty from his cheek; 
And he will look as hollow as a ghost, 
As dim and meagre as an ague's fit. 
And so he'll die ; and rising so again, 
When I shall meet him in the court of heav'n 
I shall not know him ; therefore never, never 
Must I behold my pretty Arthur more. 

K. Philip. You are as fond of grief as of your child. 

Constance. Grief fills the room up of my absent child : 
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me ; 
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, 
Remembers me of all his gracious parts ; 
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form ; 
Then have I reason to be fond of grief," 

The contrast between the mild resignation of Queen Katherine 
to her own wrongs, and the wild, uncontrollable affliction of 
Constance for the wrongs which she sustains as a mother, is no 
less naturally conceived than it is ably sustained throughout 
these two wonderful characters. 

The accompaniment of the comic character of the Bastard was 

well chosen to relieve the poignant agony of suffering, and the 

cold, cowardly policy of behavior in the principal characters 

of this play. Its spirit, invention, volubility of tongue, and for- 

12 



fl62 KING JOHN. 



«wardness in action, are unbounded. Aliquando sufflaminandus 
erat, says Ben Jonson of Shakspeare. But we should be sorry 
if Ben Jonson had been his licenser. We prefer the heedless 
-magnanimity of his wit infinitely to all Jonson's laborious cau- 
'tion. The character of the Bastard's comic humor is the same 
in essence as that of other comic characters in Shakspeare ; they 
•always run on with good things, and are never exhausted ; they 
are always daring and successful. They have words at will and 
a flow of wit, like a flow of animal spirits. The difference be- 
tween Falconbridge and the others is that he is a soldier, and 
brings his wit to bear upon action, is courageous with his sword 
as well as tongue, and stimulates his gallantry by his jokes, his 
enemies feeling the sharpness of his blows and the sting of his 
sarcasms at the same time. Among his happiest sallies are his 
descanting on the composition of his own person, his invective 
against " commodity, tickling commodity," and his expression 
of contempt for the Archduke of Austria, who had killed his 
father, which begins in jest but ends in serious earnest. His 
conduct at the siege of Angiers shows that his resources were 
not confined to verbal retorts. The same exposure of the policy 
of courts and camps, of kings, nobles, priests, and cardinals, 
takes place here as in the other plays we have gone through, 
and we shall not go into a disgusting repetition. 

This, like the other plays taken from English history, is writ- 
ten in a remarkably smooth and flowing style, very different from 
some of the tragedies — Macbeth, for instance. The passages 
consist of a series of single lines, not running into one another. 
This peculiarity in the versification, which is most common in 
the three parts of Henry VI., has been assigned as a reason why 
.those plays were not written by Shakspeare. But the same 
^structure of verse occurs in his other undoubted plays, as in 
Jlichard II. and in King John. The following are instances : — 

" That daughter there of Spain, the lady Blanch, 
Is near to England ; look upon the years 
Of Lewis the dauphin, and that lovely maid. 
If lusty love should go in quest of beauty, 
Where should he find it fairer than in Blanch ? 
If zealous love should go in search of virtue, 
Where should he find it purer than in Blanch ? 



KING JOHN. 163 



If love ambitious sought a match of birth, 

Whose veins bound richer blood than lady Blanch ? 

Such as she is, in beauty, virtue, birth. 

Is the young dauphin every way complete : 

If not complete of, say he is not she ; 

And she wants nothing, to name want, 

If want it be not, that she is not he. 

He is the half part of a blessed man. 

Left to be finished by such as she ; 

And she a fair divided excellence, 

Whose fulness of perfection lies in him. 

O, two such silver currents, when they join, 

Do glorify the banks that bound them in : 

And two such shores to two such streams made one. 

Two such controlling bounds, shall you be kings, 

To these two princes, if you marry them." 

Another instance, which is certainly very happy as an exam- 
pie of the simple enumeration of a number of particulars, is 
Salisbury's remonstrance against the second crowning of the 
king. 

" Therefore to be possessed with double pomp, 
To guard a title that was rich before ; 
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, 
To throw a perfume on the violet. 
To smooth the ice, to add another hue 
Unto the rainbow, or with taper light 
To seek the beauteous eye of heav'n to garnish : 
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess." 



164 TWELFTH NIGHT: OR, 



TWELFTH NIGHT; OR, WHAT YOU WILL. 



This is justly considered as one of the most delightful of Shak- 
speare's comedies. It is full of sweetness and pleasantry. It 
is perhaps too good-natured for comedy. It has little satire, and 
no spleen. It aims at the ludicrous rather than the ridiculous. 
It makes us laugh at the follies of mankind, not despise them, 
and still less bear any ill-will towards them. Shakspeare's comic 
genius resembles the bee rather in its power of extracting sweets 
from weeds or poisons, than in leaving a sting behind it. He 
gives the most amusing exaggeration of the prevailing foibles of 
his characters, but in a way that they themselves, instead of 
being offended at, would almost join in to humor ; he rather con- 
trives opportunities for them to show themselves off in the hap- 
piest lights, than renders them contemptible in the perverse con- 
struction of the wit or malice of others. There is a certain 
stage of society in which people become conscious of their pe- 
culiarities and absurdities, affect to disguise what they are, and 
set up pretensions to what they are not. This gives rise to a 
corresponding style of comedy, the object of which is to detect 
the disguises of self-love, and to make reprisals on these pre- 
posterous assumptions of vanity, by marking the contrast be- 
tween the real and the affected character as severely as possi- 
ble, and denying to those, who would impose on us for what they 
are not, even the merit which they have. This is the comedy 
of artificial life, of wit and satire, such as we see it in Congreve, 
Wycherley, Vanbrugh, &c. To this succeeds a state of society 
from which the same sort of affectation and pretence are ban- 
ished by a greater knowledge of the world or by their successful 
exposure on the stage ; and which by neutralising the materials 



WHAT YOU WILL. i^ 



of comic character, both natural and artificial, leaves no comedy 
at all — hut the sentimental. Such is our modern comedy. There 
is a period in the progress of manners anterior to both these, in 
which the foibles and follies of individuals are of nature's plant- 
ing, not the growth of art or study ; in which they are therefore 
unconscious of them themselves, or care not who knows them, 
if they can but have their whim out ; and in which, as there is 
no attempt at imposition, the spectators rather receive pleasure 
from humoring the inclinations of the persons they laugh at, 
than wish to give them pain by exposing their absurdity. This 
may be called the comedy of nature, and it is the comedy which 
we generally find in Shakspeare. Whether the analysis here 
given be just or not, the spirit of his comedies is evidently quite 
distinct from that of the authors above mentioned, as it is in its 
essence the same with that of Cervantes, and also very frequently 
of Moliere, though he was more systematic in his extravagance 
than Shakspeare. Shakspeare's comedy is of a pastoral and 
poetical cast. Folly is indigenous to the soil, and shoots out 
with native, happy, unchecked luxuriance. Absurdity has 
every encouragement afforded it ; and nonsense has room to 
flourish in. Nothing is stunted by the churlish, icy hand of in- 
difference or severity. The poet runs riot in a conceit, and idol- 
izes a quibble. His whole object is to turn the meanest or rudest 
objects to a pleasurable account. The relish which he has of a 
pun, or of the quaint humor of a low character, does not inter- 
fere with the delight with which he describes a beautiful image, 
or the most refined love. The clown's forced jests do not spoil 
the sweetness of the character of Viola ; the same house is big 
enough to hold Malvolio, the Countess, Maria, Sir Toby, and 
Sir Andrew Ague-cheek. For instance, nothing can fall much 
lower than this last character in intellect or morals : yet how 
are his weaknesses nursed and dandled by Sir Toby into some- 
thing " high fantastical," when on Sir Andrew's commendation 
of himself for dancing and fencing. Sir Toby answers — " Where- 
fore are these things hid 1 Wherefore have these gifts a curtain 
before them ? Are they like to take dust like mistress Moll's 
picture ? Why dost thou not go to church in a galliard, and 
come home in a coranto? My very walk should be a jig! 



166 TWELFTH NIGHT ; OR, 

What dost thou mean ? Is this a world to hide virtues in ? I 
did think by the excellent constitution of thy leg, it was framed 
under the star of a galliard !" How Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, 
and the Clown afterwards chirp over their cups, how they " rouse 
the night-owl in a catch, able to draw three souls out of one 
weaver V What can be better than Sir Toby's unanswerable 
answer to Malvolio, " Dost thou think, because thou art virtu- 
ous, there shall be no more cakes and ale ?" — In a word, the 
best turn is given to everything, instead of the worst. There is 
a constant infusion of the romantic and enthusiastic, in propor- 
tion as the characters are natural and sincere ; whereas, in the 
more artificial style of comedy, everything gives way to ridicule 
and indifference, there being nothing left but affectation on one 
side, and incredulity on the other. Much as we like Shak- 
speare's comedies, we cannot agree with Dr. Johnson that they 
are better than his tragedies ; nor do we like them half so well. 
If his inclination to comedy sometimes led him to trifle with the 
seriousness of tragedy, the poetical and impassioned passages 
are the best parts of his comedies. The great and secret charm 
of Twelfth Night is the character of Viola. Much as we 
think of catches and cakes and ale, there is something that we 
like better. We have a friendship for Sir Toby ; we patronise 
Sir Andrew ; we have an understanding with the Clown, a sneak, 
ing kindness for Maria and her rogueries ; we feel a regard for 
Malvolio, and sympathize with his gravity, his smiles, his cross 
garters, his yellow stockings, and imprisonment in the stocks. 
But there is something that excites in us a stronger feeling than 
all this — it is Viola's confession of her love. 

" Duke. What's her history ? 

Viola. A blank, my lord, she never told her love : 
She let concealment, like a worm i' th' bud, 
Feed on her damask cheek ; she pin'd in thought, 
And with a green and yellow melancholy 
She sat like patience on a monument. 
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed ? 
We men may say more, swear more, but indeed, 
Our shows are more than will ; for still we prove 
Much in our vows, but little in our love. 

Duke. But died thy sister of her love, my boy ? 



WHAT YOU WILL. 1«7 



Viola. I am all the daughters of my father's house, 
And all the brothers too ;— and yet I know not."— 

Shakspeare alone could describe the effect of his own poetry. 

" Oh, it came o'er the ear like the sweet south 
That breathes upon a bank of violets. 
Stealing and giving odor." 

What we so much admire here is not the image of Patience on 
a monument, which has been generally quoted, but the lines be- 
fore and after it. " They give a very echo to the seat where 
love is throned." How long ago it is since we first learnt to re- 
peat them ; and still, still they vibrate on the heart, like the sounds 
which the passing wind draws from the trembling strings of a 
harp left on some desert shore ! There are other passages of 
not less impassioned sweetness. Such is Olivia's address to Se- 
bastian, whom she supposes to have already deceived her in a 
promise of marriage. 

" Blame not this haste of mine : if you mean well. 
Now go with me and with this holy man 
Into the chantry by: there before him, 
And underneath that consecrated roof, 
Plight me the full assurance of your faith, 
That my most jealous and too doubtful soul 
May live at peace." 

We have already said something of Shakspeare's songs. One 
of the most beautiful of them occurs in this play, with a preface 
of his own to it. 

« Duke. fellow, come ; the song we had last night. 
Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain ; 
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun, 
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones. 
Do use to chaunt it: it is silly sooth. 
And dallies with the innocence of love, 
Like the old age. 

SONG. 

Come away, come away, death, 
And in sad Cyprus let me be laid ; 



168 TWELFTH NIGHT ; OR 

Fly away, fly away, breath ; 
I am slain by a fair cruel maid. 
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew, 

O prepare it ; 
My part of death no one so true 

Did share it. 

Not a flower, not a flower sweet, 
On my black coffin let there be strewn ; 

Not a friend, not a friend greet 
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown : 
A thousand thousand sighs to save, 

Lay me, ! where 
Sad true love never find my grave, 
To weep there," 

Who after this will say that Shakspeare's genius was only 
fitted for comedy ? Yet after reading other parts of this play, 
and particularly the garden-scene where Malvolio picks up the 
letter, if we were to say that his genius for comedy was less 
than his genius for tragedy, it would perhaps only prove that 
our own taste in such matters is more saturnine than mercurial. 

" Enter Maria. 

Sir Toby. Here comes the little villain : — How now, my nettle of In- 
dia? 

Maria. Get ye all three into the box-tree : Malvolio's coming down 
this walk : he has been yonder i' the sun, practising behavior to his own 
shadow this half hour : observe him, for the love of mockery ; for I know 
this letter will make a contemplative idiot of him. Close, in the name of 
jesting ! Lie thou there ; for here comes the trout that must be caught with 
tickling. 

\,Th€y hide themselves. Maria throws down a letter, and Exit.'\ 

Enter Malvolio. 

Malvolio. 'Tis but fortune ; all is fortune. Maria once told me she 
did affect me ; and I have heard herself come thus near, that, should she 
fancy, it should be one of my complexion. Besides, she uses me with a 
more exalted respect than any one else that follows her. What should I 
think on 't ? 

Sir Toby. Here's an over-weening rogue ! 

Fabian. O, peace ! Contemplation makes a rare turkeycock of him ; 
how he jets under his advanced plumes ! 

Sir Andrew. 'Slight, I could so beat the rogue :— 



WHAT YOU WILL. 169 



Sir Toby. Peace, I say. 

Malvolio. To be Count Malvolio ; — 

Sir Toby. Ah, rogue ! 

Sir Andrew. Pistol him, pistol him. 

Sir Toby. Peace, peace ! 

Malvolio. There is example for 't ; the lady of the Strachy married 
the yeoman of the wardrobe. 

Sir Andrew. Fie on him, Jezebel ! 

Fabian. 0, peace ! now he's deeply in ; look, how imagination blows 
him. 

Malvolio. Having been three months married to her, sitting in my 
chair of state, — 

Sir Toby. for a stone-bow, to hit him in the eye I 

Malvolio. Calling my officers about me, in my branch'd velvet gown ; 
having come from a day-bed, where I have left Olivia sleeping. 

Sir Toby. Fire and brimstone ! 

Fabian. peace, peace ! 

Malvolio. And then to have the humor of state : and after a demure 

travel of regard, telling them, I know my place, as I would they should 

do theirs, — to ask for my kinsman Toby. 

Sir Toby. Bolts and shackles ! 

Fabian. 0, peace, peace, peace ! now, now. 

Malvolio. Seven of my people, with an obedient start, make out for 
him I frown the while ; and, perchance, wind up my watch, or play with 
some rich jewel. Toby approaches ; curtsies there to me : 

Sir Toby. Shall this fellow live .' 

Fabian. Though our silence be drawn from us witn cares, yet peace. 

Malvolio. I extend my hand to him thus, quenching my familiar smile 
with an austere regard of control : 

Sir Toby. And does not Toby take you a blow of the lips then .' 

Malvolio. Saying — Cousin Toby, my fortunes having cast me on your 
niece, give me this prerogative of speech ; — 

Sir Toby. What, what ? 

Malvolio. You must amend your drunkenness. 

Fabian. Nay, patience, or we break the sinews of our plot. 

Malvolio. Besides, you waste the treasure of your time with a foolish 
knight— 

Sir Andrew. That's me, I warrant you. 

Malvolio. One Sir Andrew 

Sir Andrew. I knew, 'twas I ; for many do call me fool. 

Malvolio. What employment have we here ? 

[Taking up the letter" 

The letter and his comments on it are equally good. If poor 
Malvolio's treatment afterwards is a little hard, poetical justice 



170 TWELFTH NIGHT: OR, WHAT YOU WILL. 

is done in the uneasiness which Olivia suffers on account of her 
mistaken attachment to Cesario, as her insensibility to the vio- 
lence of the Duke's passion is atoned for by the discovery of 
Viola's concealed love of him. 



TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA. 171 



THE 



TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA 



This is little more than the first outlines of a comedy loosely 
sketched in. It is the story of a novel dramatised with very 
little labor or pretension ; yet there are passages of high poetical 
spirit, and of inimitable quaintness of humor, which are un- 
doubtedly Shakspeare's, and there is throughout the conduct of 
the fable, a careless grace and felicity which marks it for his. 
One of the editors (we believe Mr. Pope) remarks in a marginal 
note to the Two Gentlemen of Verona — " It is observable (I 
know not for what cause) that the style of this comedy is less 
figurative, and more natural and unaffected than the greater 
part of this author's, though supposed to be one of the first he 
wrote." Yet so little does the editor appear to have made up his 
mind upon this subject, that we find the following note to the 
very next (the second) scene. " This whole scene, like many 
others in these plays (some of which I believe were written by 
Shakspeare, and others interpolated by the players) is composed 
of the lowest and most trifling conceits, to be accounted for only 
by the gross taste of the age he lived in : Populo ut placerent. 
I wish I had authority to leave them out, but I have done all I 
could, set a mark of reprobation upon them, throughout this 
edition." It is strange that our fastidious critic should fall so 
soon from praising to reprobating. The style of the familiar 
parts of this comedy is indeed made up of conceits — low they 
may be for what we know, but then they are not poor, but rich 
ones. The scene of Launce with his dog (not that in the se- 
cond, but that in the fourth act) is a perfect treat in the way of 



17^ TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA. 

farcical drollery and invention ; nor do we think Speed's man- 
ner of proving his master to be in love deficient in wit or sense, 
though the style may be criticised as not simple enough for the 
modern taste. 

** Valentine. Why, how know you that I am in love ? 

Speed. Marry, by these special marks : first, you have learned, like Sir 
Protheus, to wreathe your arms like a malcontent, to relish a love-song like 
a Tobin-red-breast, to walk alone like one that had the pestilence, to sigh 
like a school-boy that had lost his A B C, to weep like a young wench that 
had lost her gr-andam, to fast like one that takes diet, to watch like one that 
fears robbing, to speak puling like a beggar at Hallowmas, You were 
wont, when you laughed, to crow like a cock ; when you walked, to walk 
like one of the lions ; when you fasted, it was presently after dinner ; when 
you looked sadly, it was for want of money ; and now you are metamor- 
phosed with a mistress that when I look on you, I can hardly think you 
my master." 

The tender scenes in this play, though not so highly wrought 
as in some others, have often much sweetness of sentiment and 
expression. There is something pretty and playful in the con- 
versation of Julia with her maid, when she shows such a dispo- 
sition to coquetry about receiving the letter from Protheus ; and 
her behavior afterwards and her disappointment, when she finds 
him faithless to his vows, remind us at a distance of Imogen's 
tender constancy. Her answer to Lucetta, who advises her 
against following her lover in disguise, is a beautiful piece of 
poetry. 

" Lucetta. I do not seek to quench your love's hot fire. 
But qualify the fire's extremest rage, 
Lest it should burn above the bounds of reason. 

Julia. The more thou damm'st it up, the more it burns ; 
The current that with gentle murmur glides. 
Thou know'st, being stopp'd, impatiently doth rage ; 
But when his fair course is not hindered. 
He makes sweet music with th' enamell'd stones, 
Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge 
He overtaketh in his pilgrimage. 
And so by many winding nooks he strays. 
With willing sport, to the wild ocean. 
Then let me go, and hinder not my course ; 
I'll be as patient as a gentle stream. 



TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA. 173 



And make a pastime of each weary step, 
Till the last step have brought me to my love ; 
And there I'll rest, as after much turmoil, 
A blessed soul doth in Elysium." 

If Shakspeare indeed had written only this and other passages 
in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, he would almost have de- 
served Milton's praise of him — 

And sweetest Shakspeare, Fancy's child, 
Warbles his native wood-notes wild. 

But as it is, he deserves rather more praise than this. 



174 MERCHANT OF VENICE. 



THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 



This is a play that in spite of the change of manners and of 
prejudices still holds undisputed possession of the stage. Shak- 
speare's malignant has outlived Mr. Cumberland's benevolent 
Jew. In proportion as Shylock has ceased to be a popular bug- 
bear, " baited with the rabble's curse," he becomes a half-favor- 
ite with the philosophical part of the audience, who are dispos- 
ed to think that Jewish revenge is at least as good as Christian 
injuries. Shylock is a good hater; "a man no less sinned 
against than sinning." If he carries his revenge too far, yet 
he has strong grounds for " the lodged hate he bears Anthonio," 
which he explains with equal force of eloquence and reason. 
He seems the depositary of the vengeance of his race ; and 
though the long habit of brooding over daily insults and injuries 
has crusted over his temper with inveterate misanthropy, and 
hardened him against the contempt of mankind, this adds but 
little to the triumphant pretensions of his enemies. There is a 
strong, quick, and deep sense of justice mixed up with the gall 
and bitterness of his resentment. The constant apprehension of 
being burnt alive, plundered, banished, reviled and trampled on, 
might be supposed to sour the most forbearing nature, and to 
take something from that " milk of human kindness," with 
which his persecutors contemplated his indignities. The desire 
of revenge is almost inseparable from the sense of wrong ; and 
we can hardly help sympathizing with the proud spirit, hid be- 
neath his " Jewish gaberdine," stung to madness by repeated 
undeserved provocations, and laboring to throw off the load of 
obloquy and oppression heaped upon him and all his tribe by 



MERCHANT OF VENICE. 175 

one desperate act of " lawful " revenge, till the ferociousness of 
the means by which he is to execute his purpose, and the perti- 
nacity with which he adheres to it, turn us against him ; but 
even at last, when disappointed of the sanguinary revenge with 
which he had glutted his hopes, and exposed to 'beggary and 
contempt by the letter of the law on which he had insisted with 
so little remorse, we pity him and think him hardly dealt with 
by his judges. In all his answers and retorts upon his adversa- 
ries, he has the best not only of the argument but of the ques- 
tion, reasoning on their own principles and practice. They are 
so far from allowing of any measure of equal dealing, of com- 
mon justice or humanity between themselves and the Jew, that, 
even when they come to ask a favor of him, and Shylock re- 
minds them that " on such a day they spit upon him, another 
spurned him, another called him dog, and for these courtesies 
request he'll lend them so much monies " — Anthonio, his old 
enemy, instead of any acknowledgment of the shrewdness and 
justice of his remonstrance, which would have been prepos- 
terous in a respectable Catholic merchant in those times, threat, 
ens him with a repetition of the same treatment — 

" I am as like to call thee so again, 

To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too." 

After this, the appeal to the Jew's mercy, as if there were 
any common principle of right and wrong between them, is the 
rankest hypocrisy, or the blindest prejudice ; and the Jew's 
answer to one of Anthonio's friends, who asks him what his 
pound of forfeit flesh is good for, is irresistible — 

" To bait fish withal ; if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my re- 
venge. He hath disgrac'd me, and hindered me of half a million, laugh'd 
at my losses, mock'd at my gains, scorn'd my nation, thwarted my bargains, 
cool'd my friends, heated mine enemies ; and what's his reason ."• I am a 
Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes ; hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, 
senses, affections, passions ; fed with the same food, hurt with the same 
weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed 
and cooled by the same winter and summer that a Christian is .' If you 
prick us, do we not bleed ? If you tickle us, do we not laugh ? If you 
poison us, do we not die ? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge ? If 



176 MERCHANT OF VENICE. 

we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong 
a Christian, what is his humility .'' revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, 
what should his sufferance be by Christian example ? why revenge. The 
•fillainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better 
the instruction." 

The whole of the trial-scene, both before and after the entrance 
of Portia, is a master-piece of dramatic skill. The legal acute- 
ness, the passionate declamations, the sound maxims of jurispru- 
dence, the wit and irony interspersed in it, the fluctuations of 
hope and fear in the different persons, and the completeness and 
suddenness of the catastrophe, cannot be surpassed. Shylock, 
who is his own counsel, defends himself well, and is triumphant 
on all the general topics that are urged against him, and only 
fails through a legal flaw. Take the following as an instance: — 

" Shylock. What judgment shall I dread, doing no wrong ? 
You have among you many a purchas'd slave, 
Which, like your asses, and your dogs, and mules, 
You use in abject and in slavish part. 
Because you bought them : — shall I say to you. 
Let them be free, marry them to your heirs } 
Why sweat they under burdens ? let their beds 
Be made as soft as yours, and let their palates 
Be season'd with such viands ? you will answer. 
The slaves are ours : — so do I answer you : 
The pound of flesh, which I demand of him, 
Is dearly bought, is mine, and I will have it : 
If you deny me, fie upon your law ! 
There is no force in the decrees of Venice : 
I stand for judgment : answer ; shall I have it ?" 

The keenness of his revenge awakes all his faculties ; and he 
beats back all opposition to his purpose, whether grave or gay, 
whether of wit or argument, with an equal degree of earnestness 
and self-possession. His character is displayed as distinctly in 
other less prominent parts of the play, and we may collect from 
a few sentences the history of his life — his descent and origin, his 
thrift and domestic economy, his affection for his daughter, whom 
he loves next to his wealth, his courtship and his first present to 
Leah, his wife ! " I would not have parted with it '' (the ring 



MERCHANT OF VENICE. 177 

which he first gave her) " for a wilderness of monkies !" What 
a fine Hebraism is implied in this expression ! 

Portia is not a very great favorite with us ; neither are we in 
love with her maid, Nerissa. Portia has a certain degree of affec- 
tation and pedantry about her, which is very unusual in Shak- 
speare's women, but which perhaps was a proper qualification for 
the office of a " civil doctor," which she undertakes and executes 
so successfully. The speech about Mercy is very well ; but 
there are a thousand finer ones in Shakspeare. We do not ad- 
mire the scene of the caskets; and object entirely to the Black 
Prince Morocchius. We should like Jessica better if she had not 
deceived and robbed her father, and Lorenzo, if he had not mar- 
ried a Jewess, though he thinks he has a right to wrong a Jew. 
The dialogue between this newly-married couple by moonlight, 
beginning " On such a night," &c., is a collection of classical ele- 
gancies. Launcelot, the Jew's man, is an honest fellow. The 
dilemma in which he describes himself placed between his "con- 
science and the fiend," the one of which advises him to run away 
from his master's service and the other to stay in it, is exquisitely 
humorous. 

Gratiano is a very admirable subordinate character. He is the 
jester of the piece : yet one speech of his, in his own defence, 
contains a whole volume of wisdom. 

" Anthonio. I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano, 
A stage, where every one must play his part ; 
And mine a sad one. 

Gratiano. Let me play the fool : 
With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come ; 
And let my liver rather heat with wine, 
Than my heart cool with mortifying groans. 
Why should a man, whose blood is warm within, 
Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster ? 
Sleep when he wakes .' and creep into the jaundice 
By being peevish ? 1 tell thee what, Anthonio — 
I love thee, and it is my love that speaks :— 
There are a sort of men, whose visages 
Do cream and mantle like a standing pond : 
And do a wilful stillness entertain. 
With purpose to be drest in an opinion 
Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit ; 
13 



178 MERCHANT OF VENICE. 

As who should say, / am Sir Oracle, 
And when I ope my lips, let no dog hark ! 

0, my Anthonio, I do know of these, 
That therefore only are reputed wise. 
For saying nothing ; who, I am very sure, 
If they should speak, w^ould almost damn those ears, 
Which hearing them, would call their brothers, fools. 
I'll tell thee more of this another time : 
But fish not, with this melancholy bait, 
For this fool's gudgeon, this opinion." 
I 

Gratiano's speech on the philosophy of love, and the effect of 
habit in taking off the force of passion, is as full of spirit and good 
sense. The graceful winding up of this play in the fifth act, aftei 
the tragic business is despatched, is one of the happiest instances 
of Shakspeare's knowledge of the principles of the drama. We 
do not mean the pretended quarrel between Portia and Nerissa 
and their husbands about the rings, which is amusing enough, 
but the conversation just before and after the return of Portia to 
her own house, beginning, " How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon 
this bank," and ending " Peace ! how the moon sleeps with Endy- 
mion and would not be awaked." There is a number of beautiful 
thoughts crowded into that short space, and linked together by the 
most natural transitions. 

When we first went to see Mr. Kean in Shylock, we expected 
to see, what we had been used to see, a decrepid old man, bent 
with age and ugly with mental deformity, grinning with deadly 
malice, with the venom of his heart congealed in the expression 
of his countenance, sullen, morose, gloomy, inflexible, brooding 
over one idea, that of his hatred, and fixed on one unalterable 
purpose, that of his revenge. We were disappointed, because 
we had taken our idea from other actors, not from the play. 
There is no proof there that Shylock is old, but a single line, 
" Bassanio and old Shylock, both stand forth," — which does not 
imply that he is infirm with age — and the circumstance that he 
has a daughter marriageable, which does not imply that he is old 
at all. It would be too much to say that his body should be made 
crooked and deformed to answer to his mind, which is bowed 
down and warped with prejudices and passion. That he has 
but one idea, is not true ; he has more ideas than any other per- 



MERCHANT OF VENICE. 179 

son in the piece ; and if he is intense and inveterate in the pur- 
suit of his purpose, he shows the utmost elasticity, vigor, and 
presence of mind, in the means of attaining it. But so rooted 
was our habitual impression of the part from seeing itcaricatur- 
ed in the representation, that it was only from a careful perusal 
of the play itself that we saw our error. The stage is not in 
general the best place to study our author's characters in. It is 
too often filled with traditional common-place conceptions of the 
part, handed down from sire to son, and suited to the taste of 
the great vulgar and the small. — " 'Tis an unweeded garden : 
things rank and gross do merely gender in it !" If a man of ge- 
nius comes once in an age to clear away the rubbish, to make it 
fruitful and wholesome, they cry, " 'Tis a bad school : it may be 
like nature, it may be like Shakspeare, but it is not like us." 
Admirable critics ! 



180 THE WINTER'S TALE. 



THE WINTER'S TALE. 



We wonder that Mr. Pope should have entertained doubts of 
the genuineness of this play. He was, we suppose, shocked (as 
a certain critic suggests) at the Chorus, Time, leaping over six- 
teen years with his crutch between the third and fourth act, and 
at Antigonus's landing with the infant Perdita on the sea-coast 
of Bohemia. These slips or blemishes, however, do not prove it 
not to be Shakspeare's ; for he was as likely to fall into them as 
anybody ; but we do not know anybody but himself who could 
produce the beauties. The stuff of which the tragic passion is 
composed, the romantic sweetness, the comic humor, are evident- 
ly his. Even the crabbed and tortuous style of the speeches of 
Leontes, reasoning on his own jealousy, beset with doubts and 
fears, and entangled more and more in the thorny labyrinth, 
bears every mark of Shakspeare's peculiar manner of conveying 
the painful struggle of different thoughts and feelings, laboring 
for utterance, and almost strangled in the birth. For instance : — 

" Ha' not you seen, Camillo ? 
(But that's past doubt ; you have, or your eye-glass 
Is thicker than a cuckold's horn) or heard ? 
(For to a vision so apparent, rumor 
Cannot be mute) or thought (for cogitation 
Resides not within man that does not think) 
My wife is slippery ? if thou wilt confess, 
Or else be impudently negative, 
To have nor eyes, nor ears, nor thought.'* 

Here Leontes is confounded with his passion, and does not 
know which way to turn himself, to give words to the anguish, 
rage, and apprehension, which tug at his breast. It is only as 



THE WINTER'S TALE. 181 

he is worked up into a clearer conviction of his wrongs by insist- 
ing on the grounds of his unjust suspicions to Camillo, who irri- 
tates him by his opposition, that he bursts out into the following 
vehement strain of bitter indignation : yet even here his passion 
staggers, and is as it were oppressed with its own intensity. 

" Is whispering nothing ? 
Is leaning cheek to cheek ? is meeting noses ? 
Kissing witli inside lip ? stopping the career 
Of laughter with a sigh ? (a note infallible 
Of breaking honesty !) horsing foot on foot ? 
Skulking in corners ? wishing clocks more swift ? 
Hours, minutes ? the noon, midnight ? and all eyes 
Blind with the pin and web, but theirs ; theirs only. 
That would, unseen, be wicked ? is this nothing ? 
Why then the world, and all that's in 't, is nothing, 
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia's nothing, 
My wife is nothing." 

The character of Hermione is as much distinguished by its 
saint-like resignation and patient forbearance, as that of Paulina 
is by her zealous and spirited remonstrances against the injustice 
done to the queen, and by her devoted attachment to her mis- 
fortunes. Hermione's restoration to her husband and her child, 
after her long separation from them, is as affecting in itself as it is 
striking in the representation. Camillo, and the old shepherd 
and his son, are subordinate but not uninteresting instruments in 
the development of the plot, and though last, not least, comes 
Autolycus, a very pleasant, thriving rogue ; and (what is the 
best feather in the cap of all knavery) he escapes with impunity 
in the end. 

The Winteu's Tale is one of the best-acting of our author's 
plays. We remember seeing it with great pleasure many years 
ago. It was on the night that King took leave of the stage, 
when he and Mrs. Jordan played together in the after-piece of 
the Wedding-day. Nothing could go off with more eclat, with 
more spirit, and grandeur of effect. Mrs. Siddons played Her- 
mione, and in the last scene acted the painted statue to the life 
— with true monumental dignity and noble passion ; Mr. Kem- 
ble in Leontes worked himself up into a very fine classical 



182 THE WINTER'S TALE. 

phrensy ; and Bannister, as Autolycus, roared as loud for pity 
as a sturdy beggar could do who felt none of the pain he coun- 
terfeited, and was sound of wind and limb. We shall never 
see these parts so acted again ; or if we did, it would be in vain. 
Actors grow old, or no longer surprise us by their novelty. 
But true poetry, like nature, is always young ; and we still read 
the courtship of Florizel and Perdita, as we welcome the return 
of spring, with the same feelings as ever 

" Florizel. Thou dearest Perdita, 
With these forc'd thoughts, I pr'ythee darken not 
The mirth o' the feast : or I'll be thine, my fair. 
Or not my father's : for I cannot be 
Mine own or anything to any, if 
I be not thine. To this I am most constant. 
Tho' destiny say, no. Be merry, gentle ; 
Strangle such thoughts as these, with anything 
That you behold the while. Your guests are coming : 
Lift up your countenance ; as it were the day 
Of celebration of that nuptial, which 
We two have sworn shall come. 

Perdita. lady fortune. 
Stand you auspicious ! 

Enter Shepherd, Clown, Mopsa, Dorcas, Servants ; with 
PoLiXENEs, and Camillo, disguised. 

Florizel. See, your guests approach : 
Address yourself to entertain them sprightly. 
And let's be red with mirth. 

Shepherd. Fie, daughter ! when my old wifeliv'd, upon 
This day, she was both pantler, butler, cook ; 
Both dame and servant : welcom'd all, serv'd all : 
Would sing her song, and dance her turn : now here 
At upper end o' the table, now i' the middle : 
On his shoulder, and his : her face o' the fire 
With labor ; and the thing she took to quench it 
She would to each one sip. You are retir'd. 
As if you were -a feasted one, and not 
The hostess of the meeting. Pray you, bid 
These unknown friends to us welcome ; for it is 
A way to make us better friends, more known. 
Come, quench your blushes ; and present yourself 
That which you are, mistress o' the feast. Come on. 



THE WINTER'S TALE. 183 



And bid us welcome to your sheep-shearing-, 
As your good flock shall prosper. 

Perdita. Sir, welcome ! 

[To PoLiXENEs and Camillo. 
It is my father's will I should take on me 
The hostess-ship o' the day : you 're welcome, sir 1 
Give me those flowers there, Dorcas.— Reverend sirs, 
For you there's rosemary and rue ; these keep 
Seeming, and savor, all the winter long : 
Grace and remembrance be unto you both. 
And welcome to our shearing ! 

PoLixENEs. Shepherdess 
(A fair one are you), well you fit our ages 
With flowers of winter. 

Perdita. Sir, the year growing ancient. 
Not yet on summer's death, nor on the birth 
Of trembling winter, the fairest flowers o' the season 
Are our carnations, and streak'd gilly-flowers. 
Which some call nature's bastards : of that kind 
Our rustic garden's barren ; and I care not 
To get slips of them. 

PoLixENEs. Wherefore, gentle maiden, 
Do you neglect them ? 

Perdita. For I have heard it said 
There is an art, which, in their piedness, shares 
With great creating nature. 

PoLiXENEs. Say, there be : 
Yet nature is made better by no mean, 
But nature makes that mean : so, o'er that art 
Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art 
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry 
A gentler scyon to the wildest stock ; 
And make conceive a bark of baser kind 
By bud of nobler race. This is an art 
Which does mend nature, change it rather : but 
The art itself is nature. 

Perdita. So it is. 

PoLiXENEs. Then make your garden rich in gilly-flowers, 
And do not call them bastards, 

Perdita. I'll not put 
The dibble in earth, to set one slip of them; 
No more than, were I painted, I would wish 
This youth should say, 'twere well ; and only therefore 
Desire to breed by me.— Here's flowers for you ; 
Hot lavender, mints, savoury, marjoram ; 
The marigold, that goes to bed with the sun. 



184 THE WINTER'S TALE. 

And with him rises, weeping : these are flowers 
Of middle summer, and, I think, they are given 
To men of middle age. You are very welcome. 

Camillo. I should leave grazing, were I of your flock, 
And only live by gazing. 

Perdita. Out, alas ! 
You'd be so lean, that blasts of January 

Would blow you through and through. Now, my fairest friends, 
I would I had some flowers o' the spring, that might 
Become your time of day ; and your's, and your's. 
That wear upon your virgin branches yet 
Your maiden-heads growing : Proserpina, 
For the flowers now, that frighted, thou let'st fall 
From Dis's waggon I daffodils. 
That come before the swallow dares, and take 
The winds of March with beauty : violets dim. 
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes. 
Or Cytherea's breath ; pale primroses. 
That die unmarried, ere they can behold 
Bright Phoebus in his strength (a malady 
Most incident to maids) ; bold oxlips, and 
The crown-imperial ; lilies of all kinds. 
The fleur-de-lis being one ! 0, these I lack 
To make you garlands of; and, my sweet friend, 
To strow him o'er and o'er. 

FiiORizEL. What, like a corse ? 

Perdita. No, like a bank, for love to lie and play on ; 
Not like a corse : or if— not to be buried, 
But quick, and in mine arms. Come, take your flowers ; 
Methinks, I play as I have seen them do 
In Whitsun pastorals : sure this robe of mine 
Does change my disposition. 

Florizel. What you do. 
Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet, 
I'd have you do it ever : when you sing, 
I'd have you buy and sell so ; so, give alms ; 
Pray, so ; and for the ordering your aflTairs, 
To sing them too. When you do dance, I wish you 
A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do 
Nothing but that : move still, still so. 
And own no other function. Each your doing, 
So singular in each particular. 
Crowns what you're doing in the present deeds, 
That all your acts are queens. 

Perdita. Doricles, 
Your praises are too large ; but that your youth 



THE WINTER'S TALE. 185 

And the true blood, which peeps forth fairly through it. 
Do plainly give you out an unstained shepherd ; 
With wisdom I might fear, my Doricles, 
You woo'd me the false way. 

Florizel. I think you have 
As little skill to fear, as I have purpose 
To put you to 't. But come, our dance, I pray : 
Your hand, my Perdita : so turtles pair, 
That never mean to part. 

Perdita. Pll swear for 'em. 

PoLixENEs. This is the prettiest low-born lass that ever 
Ran on the green-sward ; nothing she does, or seems, 
But smacks of something greater than herself. 
Too noble for this place. 

Camillo. He tells her something 
That makes her blood look out : good sooth she is 
The queen of curds and cream,' 

This delicious scene is interrupted by the father of the prince 
discovering himself to Florizel, and haughtily breaking off the 
intended match between his son and Perdita. When Polixenes 
goes out, Perdita says, 

" Even here undone : 
I was not much afraid ; for once or twice 
I was about to speak ; and tell him plainly. 
The self-same sun that shines upon his court, 
Hides not his visage from our cottage, but 
Looks on't alike. Wilt please you, sir, begone ? 

ITo Florizel. 
I told you what would come of this. Beseech you. 
Of your own state take care : this dream of mine. 
Being now awake, I'll queen it no inch farther, 
But milk my ewes and weep." 

As Perdita, the supposed shepherdess, turns out to be the daugh- 
ter of Hermione, and a princess in disguise, both feelings of the 
pride of birth and the claims of nature are satisfied by the for- 
tunate event of the story, and the fine romance of poetry is re- 
conciled to the strictest court etiquette. 



186 ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL. 



All's WELL THAT ENDS WELL. 



All's Well that ends Well is one of the most pleasing oi 
our author's comedies. The interest is however more of a se- 
rious than of a comic nature. The character of Helen is one 
of great sweetness and delicacy. She is placed in circum- 
stances of the most critical kind, and has to court her husband 
both as a virgin and a wife : yet the most scrupulous nicety of 
female modesty is not once violated. There is not one thought 
or action that ought to bring a blush into her cheeks, or that 
for a moment lessens her in our esteem. Perhaps the romantic 
attachment of a beautiful and virtuous girl to one placed above 
her hopes by the circumstances of birth and fortune, was never 
so exquisitely expressed as in the reflections which she utters 
when young Roussillon leaves his mother's house, under whose 
protection she has been brought up with him, to repair to the 
French king's court. 

" Helena. Oh, were that all — I think not on my father. 
And these great tears grace his remembrance more 
Than those I shed for him. What was he ^ike ? 
I have forgot him. My imagination 
Carries no favor in it, but my Bertram's. 
I am undone, there is no living, none, 
If Bertram be away. It were all one 
That I should love a bright particular star. 
And think to wed it ; he is so above me : 
In his bright radiance and collateral light 
Must I be comforted, not in his sphere. 
Th' ambition in my love thus plagues itself; 
The hind that would be mated by the lion. 
Must die for love. 'Twas pretty, tho' a plague. 



ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL. 187 



To see him every hour, to sit and draw 
His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls 
In our heart's table : heart too capable 
Of every line and trick of his sweet favor. 
But now he's gone, and my idolatrous fancy 
Must sanctify his relics." 

The interest excited by this beautiful picture of a fond and 
innocent heart is kept up afterwards by her resolution to follow 
him to France, the success of her experiment in restoring the 
king's health, her demanding Bertram in marriage as a recom- 
pense, his leaving her in disdain, her interview with him after- 
wards disguised as Diana, a young lady whom he importunes 
with his secret addresses, and their final reconciliation when 
the consequences of her stratagem and the proofs of her love 
are fully made known. The persevering gratitude of the 
French king to his benefactress, who cures him of a languishing 
distemper by a prescription hereditary in her family, the indul- 
gent kindness of the Countess, whose pride of birth yields, al- 
most without a struggle, to her affection for Helen, the honesty 
and uprightness of the good old lord Lafeu, make very interest- 
ing parts of the picture. The v.^ilful stubbornness and youthful 
petulance of Bertram are also very admirably described. The 
comic part of the play turns on the folly, boasting, and coward- 
ice of Parolles, a parasite and hanger-on of Bertram's, the de- 
tection of whose false pretensions to bravery and honor forms a 
very amusing episode. He is first found out by the old lord 
Lafeu, who says, " The soul of this man is in his clothes ;" and 
it is proved afterwards that his heart is in his tongue, and that 
both are false and hollow. The adventure of " the bringing off 
of his drum " has become proverbial as a satire on all ridicu- 
lous and blustering undertakings which the person never means 
to perform : nor can anything be more severe than what one of 
the bystanders remarks upon what Parolles says of himself, 
" Is it possible he should know what he is, and be that he is ?" 
Yet Parolles himself gives the best solution of the difficulty af- 
terwards when he is thankful to escape with his life and the loss 
of character ; for, so that he can -live on, he is by no means 
squeamish about the loss of pretensions, to which he had sense 



188 ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL. 

enough to know he had no real claim, and which he had as 
sumed only as a means to live. 

" Parolles, Yet I am thankful : if my heart were great, 
'Twould burst at this. Captain I'll be no more 
But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft 
As captain shall. Simply the thing I am 
Shall make me live : who knows himself a braggart 
Let him fear this ; for it shall come to pass, 
That every braggart shall be found an ass. 
Rust sword, cool blushes, and Parolles live 
Safest in shame ; being fool'd, by fool'ry thrive ; 
There's place and means for every man alive 
ril after them." 

The story of All's Well that ends Well and of several 
others of Shakspeare's plays, is taken from Boccaccio. The 
poet has dramatised the original novel with great skill and comic 
spirit, and has preserved all the beauty of character and senti- 
ment without improving upon it, which was impossible. There 
is indeed in Boccaccio's serious pieces a truth, a pathos, and an 
exquisite refinement of sentiment, which is hardly to be met with 
in any prose writer whatever. Justice has not been done him by 
the world. He has in general passed for a mere narrator of 
lascivious tales or idle jests. This character probably originat- 
ed in his obnoxious attacks on the monks, and has been kept up 
by the grossness of mankind, who revenged their own want of re- 
finement on Boccaccio, and only saw in his writings what suited 
the coarseness of their own tastes. But the truth is, that he has 
carried sentiment of every kind to its very highest purity and 
perfection. By sentiment we would here understand the hab- 
itual workings of some one powerful feeling, where the heart 
reposes almost entirely upon itself, without the violent excite- 
ment of opposing duties or untoward circumstances. In this 
way, nothing ever came up to the story of Frederigo Alberigi 
and his Falcon. The perseverance in attachment, the spirit of 
gallantry and generosity displayed in it, has no parallel in the 
history of heroical sacrifices. The feeling is so unconscious too, 
and involuntary, is brought out in such small, unlooked-for, and 
unostentatious circumstances, as to show it to have been woven 



ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL. 189 

into the very nature and soul of the author. The story of 
Isabella is scarcely less fine, and is more affecting in the cir- 
cumstances and in the catastrophe. Dryden has done justice to 
the impassioned eloquence of the Tancred and Sigismunda; but 
has not given an adequate idea of the wild preternatural interest 
of the story of Honoria. Cimon and Iphigenia is by no means 
one of the best, notwithstanding the popularity of the subject. 
The proof of unaltered affection given in the story of Jeronymo, 
and the simple touches of nature and picturesque beauty in the 
story of the two lovers, who were poisoned by tasting of a leaf 
in the garden at Florence, are perfect master-pieces. The 
epithet of Divine was well bestowed on this great painter of the 
human heart. The invention implied in his different tales is 
immense : but we are not to infer that it is all his own. He 
probably availed himself of all the common traditions which 
were floating about in his time, and which he was the first to 
appropriate. Homer appears the most original of all authors — 
probably for no other reason than that we can trace the plagiar- 
ism no farther. Boccaccio has furnished subjects to number- 
less writers since his time, both dramatic and narrative. The 
story of Griselda is borrowed from his Decameron by Chaucer ; 
as is the Knight's Tale (Palamon and Arcite) from his poem of 
the Theseid, 



190 LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST. 



lOVE'S LABOR'S LOST 



If we were to part with any of the author's comedies, it should 
be this. Yet we should be loth to part with Don Adrian© de 
Armado, that mighty potentate of nonsense, or his page, that 
handful of wit ; with Nathaniel the curate, or Holofernes the 
school-master, and their dispute after dinner on "the golden 
cadences of poesy ;" with Costard the clown, or Dull the con- 
stable. Biron is too accomplished a character to be lost to the 
world, and yet he could not appear without his fellow courtiers 
and the king : and if we were to leave out the ladies, the gentle- 
men would have no mistresses. So that we believe we may let 
the whole play stand as it is, and we shall hardly venture to 
" set a mark of reprobation on it." Still we have some objec- 
tions to the style, which we think savors more of the pedantic 
spirit of Shakspeare's time than of his own genius; more of con- 
ti'oversial divinity, and the logic of Peter Lombard, than of the 
inspiration of the Muse. It transports us quite as much to the 
manners of the court, and the quirks of courts of law, as to the 
scenes of nature or the fairy-land of his own imagination. 
Shakspeare has set himself to imitate the tone of polite conver- 
sation then prevailing among the fair, the witty, and the learned, 
and he has imitated it but too faithfully. It is as if the hand 
of Titian had been employed to give grace to the curls of a full- 
bottomed periwig, or Raphael had attempted to give expression 
to the tapestry figures in the House of Lords. Shakspeare has 
put an excellent description of this fashionable jargon into the 
mouth of the critical Holofernes, " as too picked, too spruce, too 
affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it;" 
and nothing can be more marked than the difference when he 



LOVE'S LABOR S LOST. 191 

breaks loose from the trammels he had imposed on himself, " as 
light as bird from brake," and speaks in his own person. We 
think, for instance, that in the following soliloquy the poet has 
fairly got the start of Queen Elizabeth and her maids of honor : — 

" BiRON. ! and I forsooth in love, 
I that have been love's w^hip ; 
A very beadle to an amorous sigh : 
A critic ; nay, a night-watch constable, 
A domineering pedant o'er the boy, 
Than whom no mortal more magnificent. 
This whimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy, 
This signior Junio, giant dwarf, Dan Cupid, 
Regent of love-rhimes, lord of folded arms, 
The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans : 
Liege of all loiterers and malecontents, 
Dread prince of plackets, king of codpieces. 
Sole imperator, and great general 
Of trotting parators (0 my little heart 1) 
And I to be a corporal of his field, 
And wear his colors like a tumbler's hoop ! 
What ? I love ! I sue ! I seek a wife ! 
A woman, that is like a German clock, 
Still a repairing ; ever out of frame ; 
And never going aright, being a watch, 
And being watch'd that it may still go right ? 
Nay, to be perjur'd, which is worst of all: 
And among three to love the worst of all, 
A whitely wanton with a velvet brow. 
With two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes ; 
Ay, and by heav'n, one that will do the deed, 
Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard ; 
And I to sigh for her ! to watch for her ! 
To pray for her 1 Go to ; it is a plague 
That Cupid will impose for my neglect 
Of his almighty, dreadful little might. 
Well, I will love, write, sigh, pray, sue, and groan : 
Some men must love my lady, and some Joan." 

The character of Biron drawn by Rosaline and that which 
Biron gives of Boyet are equally happy. The observations on 
the use and abuse of study, and on the power of beauty to 
quicken the -understanding as well as the senses, are excellent. 
The scene which has the greatest dramatic effect is that in which 



192 LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST. 

Biron, the king, Longaville, and Dumain, successively detect 
each other and are detected in their breach of their vow and in 
their profession of attachment to their several mistresses, in 
which they suppose themselves to be overheard by no one. The 
reconciliation between these lovers and their sweethearts is also 
very good, and the penance which Rosaline imposes on Biron, 
before he can expect to gain her consent to marry him, full of 
propriety and beauty. 

" Rosaline. Oft have I heard of you, my lord Biron, 
Before I saw you : and the world's large tongue 
Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks ; 
Full of comparisons, and wounding flouts ; 
Which you on all estates will execute, 
That lie within the mercy of your wit. 
To weed this wormwood from your faithful brain ; 
And therewithal to win me, if you please 
(Without the which I am not to be won), 
You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day 
Visit the speechless sick, and still converse 
With groaning wretches ; and your task shall be. 
With all the fierce endeavor of your wit, 
T' enforce the pained impotent to smile," &c. 

The famous cuckoo-song closes the play : but we shall add 
no more criticisms : " the words of Mercury are harsh after the 
songs of Apollo." 



MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. 193 



MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. 



This admirable comedy used to be frequently acted till of late 
years. Mr. Garrick's Benedick was one of his most celebrated 
characters : and Mrs. Jordan, we have understood, played Bea- 
trice very delightfully. The serious part is still the most promi- 
nent here, as in other instances that we have noticed. Hero is 
the principal figure in the piece, and leaves an indelible impres- 
sion on the mind by her beauty, her tenderness, and the hard 
trial of her love. The passage in which Claudio first makes a 
confession of his affection towards her, conveys as pleasing an 
image of the entrance of love into a youthful bosom as can well 
be imagined. 

" Oh, my lord, 
When you went onward with this ended action, 
I look'd upon her with a soldier's eye. 
That lik'd, but had a rougher task in hand 
Than to drive liking to the name of love ; 
But now I am return'd, and that war-thoughts 
Have left their places vacant ; in their rooms 
Come thronging soft and delicate desires. 
All prompting me how fair young Hero is, 
Saying, I lik'd her ere I went to wars." 

In the scene at the altar, when Claudio, urged on by the 
villain Don Jphn, brings the charge of incontinence against her, 
and as it were divorces her in the very marriage-ceremony, her 
appeals to her own conscious innocence and honor are made with 
the most affecting simplicity. 

" Claudio. No, Leonato, 
I never tempted her with word too large, 
14 



194 MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. 

But, aa a brother to his sister, show'd 
Bashful sincerity, and comely love. 

Hero. And seem'd I ever otherwise to you ? 

Cl AUDIO. Out on thy seeming, I vs'ill write against it : 
You seem to me as Dian in her orb, 
As chaste as is the bud ere it be blown : 
But you are more intemperate in your blood 
Than Venus, or those pamper'd animals 
That rage in savage sensuality. 

Hero. Is my lord well, that he doth speak so wide ? 

Leonato. Are these things spoken, or do I but dream ? 

John. Sir, they are spoken, and these things are true. 

Benedick. This looks not like a nuptial. 

Hero. True! God !" 

The justification of Hero in the end, and her restoration to 
the confidence and arms of her lover, is brought about by one 
of those temporary consignments to the grave of which Shak- 
speare seems to have been fond. He has perhaps explained the 
theory of this predilection in the following lines : — 

" Friar, She dying, as it must be so maintained, 
Upon the instant that she was accus'd, 
Shall be lamented, pity'd, and excus'd, 
Of every hearer : for it so falls out, 
That what we have we prize not to the worth, 
While we enjoy it ; but being lack'd and lost. 
Why then we rack the value ; then we find 
The virtue, that possession would not show us 
Whilst it was ours. — So will it fare with Claudio : 
When he shall hear she dy'd upon his words. 
The idea of her love shall sweetly creep 
Into his study of imagination ; 
And every lovely organ of her life 
Shall come apparel'd in more precious habit, 
More moving, delicate, and full of life, 
Into the eye and prospect of his soul, 
Than when she liv'd indeed." s. 

The principal comic characters in Much ado about Nothing, 
Benedick and Beatrice, are both essences in their kind. His 
character as a woman-hater is admirably supported, and his 
conversicn to matrimony is no less happily effected by the pre- 
tended story of Beatrice's love for him. It is hard to say which 



MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. 195 

of the two scenes is the best, that of the trick which is thus 
practised on Benedick, or that in which Beatrice is prevailed on 
to take pity on him by overhearing her cousin and her maid de- 
clare (which they do on purpose) that he is dying of love for 
her. There is something delightfully picturesque in the manner 
in which Beatrice is described as coming to hear the plot which 
is contrived against herself — 

" For look where Beatrice, like a lapwing, runs 
Close by the ground, to hear our conference." 

In consequence of what she hears (not a word of which is true) 
she exclaims, when these good-natured informants are gone, 

«* What fire is in mine ears ? Can this be true ? 

Stand I condemn'd for pride and scorn so much ? 
Contempt, farewell ! and maiden pride adieu ! 

No glory lives behind the back of such. 
And, Benedick, love on, I will requite thee; 

Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand; 
If thou dost love, my kindness shall incite thee 

To bind our loves up in an holy band : 
For others say thou dost deserve ; and I 
Believe it better than reportingly." 

And Benedick, on his part, is equally sincere in his repent- 
ance, with equal reason, after he has heard the grey-beard, 
Leonato, and his friend, " Monsieur Love," discourse of the 
desperate state of his supposed inamorata. 

" This can be no trick ; the conference was sadly borne.— They have the 
truth of this from Hero. They seem to pity the lady ; it seems her affec- 
tions have the full bent. Love me ! why, it must be requited, I hear how 
I am censur'd : they say, I will bear myself proudly, if I perceive the love 
come from her ; they say too, that she will rather die than give any sign of 
affection.— I did never think to marry : I must not seem proud :— happy are 
they that hear their detractions, and can put them to mending. They say, 
the lady is fair ; 't is a truth, I can bear them witness : and virtuous ; — 't is 
so, I cannot reprove it : and wise — but for loving me : — by my troth it is no 
addition to her wit ;— nor no great argument of her folly, for I will be hor- 
ribly in love with her.— I may chance to have some odd quirks and rem- 
nants of wit broken on me, because I have rail'd so long against marriage: 



196 MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. 

but doth not the appetite alter ? A man loves the meat in his youth that 
he cannot endure in his age. — Shall quips, and sentences, and these paper 
bullets of the brain, awe a man from the career of his humor ? No : the 
world must be peopled. When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not 
think I should live till I were married. — Here comes Beatrice : by this day, 
she's a fair lady : I do spy some marks of love in her." 

The beauty of all this arises from the characters of the per- 
sons so entrapped. Benedick is a professed and staunch enemy 
to marriage, and gives very plausible reasons for the faith that 
is in him. And as to Beatrice, she persecutes him all day with 
her jests (so that he could hardly think of being troubled with 
them at night), she turns him and all other things into ridicule, 
and is proof against everything serious : — 

" Hero. Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes, 
Misprising what they look on ; and her wit 
Values itself so highly, that to her 
All matter else seems weak : she cannot love. 
Nor take no shape nor project of affection. 
She is so self-endeared. * 

Ursula. Sure, I think so ; 
And therefore, certainly, it were not good 
She knew his love, lest she make sport at it. 

Hero. Why, you speak truth : I never yet saw man, 
How wise, how noble, young, how rarely featur'd, 
But she would spell him backward : if fair-fac'd, 
She'd swear the gentleman should be her sister ; 
If black, why, nature, drawing of an antick, 
Made a foul blot : if tall, a lance ill-headed ; 
If low, an agate very vilely cut : 
If speaking, why, a vane blown with all winds ; 
If silent, why, a block moved with none. 
So turns she every man the wrong side out ; 
And never gives to truth and virtue that 
Which simpleness and merit purchaseth." 

These were happy materials for Shakspeare to work on, and 
he has made a happy use of them. Perhaps that middle point 
of comedy was never more nicely hit in which the ludicrous 
blends with the tender, and our follies, turning round against 
themselves in support of our affections, retain nothing but their 
humanity. 



MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. I97 

Dogberry and Verges in this play are inimitable specimens 
of quaint blundering and misprisions of meaning ; and are a 
standing record of that formal gravity of pretension and total 
want of common understanding, which Shakspeare no doubt 
copied from real life, and which in the course of two hundred 
years appear to have ascended from the lowest to the highest 
offices in the state. 



1»8 AS YOU LIKE IT. 



AS YOU LIKE IT 



Shakspeare has here converted the forest of Arden into another 
Arcadia, where they " fleet the time carelessly, as they did in 
the golden world." It is the most ideal of any of this author's 
plays. It is a pastoral drama, in which the interest arises more 
out of the sentiments and characters than out of the actions or 
situations. It is not what is done, but what is said, that claims 
our attention. Nursed in solitude, " under the shade of melan- 
choly boughs," the imagination grows soft and delicate, and the 
wit runs riot in idleness, like a spoiled child, that is never 
sent to school. Caprice and fancy reign and revel here, and 
stern necessity is banished to the court. The mild sentiments 
of humanity are strengthened with thought and leisure ; the 
echo of the cares and noise of the world strikes upon the ear of 
those " who have felt them knowingly," softened by time and 
distance. " They hear the tumult, and are still." The very 
air of the place seems to breathe a spirit of philosophical poetry ; 
to stir the thoughts, to touch the heart with pity, as the drowsy 
forest rustles to the sighing gale. Never was there such beauti- 
ful moralising, equally free from pedantry or petulance. 

" And this their life, exempt from public haunts, 
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, 
Sermons in stones, and good in everything." 

Jaques is the only purely contemplative character in Shak- 
speare. He thinks and does, nothing. His whole occupation 
is to amuse his mind, and he is totally regardless of his body 
and his fortunes. He is the prince of philosophical idlers ; his 



AS YOU LIKE IT. 199 



only passion is thought ; he sets no value upon anything, but as 
it serves as food for reflection. He can " suck melancholy out 
of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs;" the motley fool, "who 
morals on the time," is the greatest prize he meets with in the 
forest. He resents Orlando's passion for Rosalind as some dis- 
paragement of his own passion for abstract truth ; and leaves 
the Duke as soon as he is restored to his sovereignty, to seek his 
brother out who has quitted it, and turned hermit. 

— " Out of these convertites 

There is much matter to be heard and learnt." 

Within the sequestered and romantic glades of the forest of 
Arden, they find leisure to be good and wise, or to play the fool 
and fall in love. Rosalind's character is made up of sportive 
gaiety and natural tenderness : her tongue runs the faster to 
conceal the pressure at her heart. She talks herself out of 
breath, only to get deeper in love. The coquetry with which 
she plays with her lover in the double character which she has 
to support is managed with the nicest address. How full of 
voluble, laughing grace is all her conversation with Orlando — 

— " In heedless mazes running 

With wanton haste and giddy cunning." 

How full of real fondness and pretended cruelty is her 
answer to him when he promises to love her " For ever and a 
day !" 

" Say a day without the ever : no, no, Orlando, men are April when 
they woo, December when they wed ; maids are May when they are maids, 
but the sky changes when they are wnves : I will be more jealous of thee 
than a Barbary cock-pigeon over his hen ; more clamorous than a parrot 
against rain ; more new-fangled than an ape ; more giddy in my desires 
than a monkey ; I will weep for nothing, like Diana in the fountain, and I 
will do that when you are disposed to be merry ; I will laugh like a hyen, 
and that when you are inclined to sleep. 

Orlando. But will my Rosalind do so ? 
Rosalind. By my life she will do as I do." 



!200 AS YOU LIKE IT. 



The silent and retired character of Celia is a necessary relief 
to the provoking loquacity of Rosalind, nor can anything be 
better conceived or more beautifully described than the mutual 
affection between the two cousins. 

— " We still have slept together, 
Rose at an instant, learn'd, play'd, eat together, 
And wheresoe'er we went, like Juno's swans. 
Still we went coupled and inseparable." 

The unrequited love of Silvius for Phebe shows the perver- 
sity of this passion in the commonest scenes of life, and the rubs 
and stops which nature throws in its way, where fortune has 
placed none. Touchstone is not in love, but he will have a mis- 
tress as a subject for the exercise of his grotesque humor, and 
to show his contempt for the passion, by his indifference about 
the person. He is a rare fellow. He is a mixture of the an- 
cient cynic philosopher with the modern buffoon, and turns folly 
into wit, and wit into folly, just as the fit takes him. His court- 
ship of Aubrey not only throws a degree of ridicule on the state 
of wedlock itself, but he is equally an enemy to the prejudices 
of opinion in other respects. The lofty tone of enthusiasm 
which the Duke and his companion in exile spread over the still- 
ness and solitude of a country life, receives a pleasant shock 
from Touchstone's skeptical determination of the question. 

" CoRiN. And how like you this shepherd's life, Mr. Touchstone .' 
Clown. Truly, shepherd, in respect of itself, it is a good life ; but in re- 
spect that it is a shepherd's life, it is naught. In respect that it is solitary, 
I like it very well ; but in respect that it is private, it is a vmy vile life. 
In respect it is in the fields, it pleaseth me well ; but in respect it is not in 
the court, it is tedious. As it is a spare life, look you it fits my humor ; 
but as there is no more plenty in it, it goes much against my stomach." 

Zimmerman's celebrated work on Solitude discovers only one 
half the sense of this passage. 

There is hardly any of Shakspeare's plays that contains a 
greater number of passages that have been quoted in books 
of extracts, or a greater number of phrases that have become 
in a manner proverbial. If we were to give all the striking 



AS YOU LIKE IT. oqi 



passages, we should give half the play. We will only recall a 
few of the most delightful to the reader's recollection. Such 
are the meeting between Orlando and Adam, the exquisite ap- 
peal of Orlando to the humanity of the Duke and his company 
to supply him with food for the old man, and their answer, the 
Duke's description of a country life, and the account of Jaques 
moralising on the wounded deer, his meeting with Touchstone 
in the forest, his apology for his own melancholy and his satiri- 
cal vein, and the well-known speech on the stages of human 
life, the old song of " Blow, blow, thou winter's wind," Rosa- 
lind's description of the marks of a lover and of the progress of 
time with different persons, the picture of the snake wreathed 
round Oliver's neck while the lioness watches her sleeping prey, 
and Touchstone's lecture to the shepherd, his defence of cuck- 
olds, and panegyric on the virtues of " an If." — All of these are 
familiar to the reader : there is one passage of equal delicacy 
and beauty which may have escaped him, and with it we shall 
close our account of As you like it. It is Phebe's description 
of Ganimed, at the end of the third act. 

" Think not I love him, tho' I ask for him ; 
'Tis but a peevish boy, yet he talks well ; — 
But what care I for words ! yet words do well, 
When he that speaks them pleases those that hear : 
It is a pretty youth ; not very pretty ; 
But sure he's proud, and yet his pride becomes him ; 
He'll make a proper man ; the best thing in him 
Is his complexion ; and faster than his tongue 
Did make offence, his eye did heal it up : 
He is not very tall, yet for his years he's tall ; 
His leg is but so so, and yet 'tis well ; 
There was a pretty redness in his lip, 
A little riper, and more lusty red 

Than that mix'd in his cheek ; 'twas just the difference 
Betwixt the constant red and mingled damask. 
There be some women, Silvius, had they mark'd him 
In parcels as I did, would have gone near 
To fall in love with him : but for my part 
I love him not, nor hate him not ; and yet 
I have more cause to hate him than to love him : 
For what had he to do to chide at me ? " 



202 THE TAMING OF THE SHREW. 



THE TAMING OF THE SHREW. 



The Taming of the Shrew is almost the only one of Shak- 
speare's comedies that has a regular plot, and downright moral. 
It is full of bustle, animation, and rapidity of action. It shows 
admirably how self-will is only to be got the better of by stronger 
will, and how one degree of ridiculous perversity is only to be 
driven out by another still greater. Petruchio is a madman in 
his senses ; a very honest fellow, who hardly speaks a word of 
truth, and succeeds in all his tricks and impostures. He acts 
his assumed character to the life, with the most fantastical ex- 
travagance, with complete presence of mind, with untired ani- 
mal spirits, and without a particle of ill-humor from beginning 
to end. The situation of poor Katherine, worn out by his inces- 
sant persecutions, becomes at last almost as pitiable as it is ludi- 
crous, and it is difficult to say which to admire most, the unac- 
countableness of his actions, or the unalterableness of his reso- 
lutions. It is a character which most husbands ought to study, 
unless perhaps the very audacity of Petruchio's attempt might 
alarm them more than his success would encourage them. What 
a sound must the following speech carry to some married ears ! 

" Think you a little din can daunt my ears ? 
Have I not in my time heard lions roar ? 
Have I not heard the sea, pufF'd up with winds. 
Rage like an angry boar, chafed with sw^eat ? 
Have I not heard great ordnance in the field ? 
And heav'n's artillery thunder in the skies ? 
Have I not in a pitched battle heard 
Loud larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets clang ? 
And do you tell me of a woman's tongue, 



THE TAMING OF THE SHREW. 203 

That gives not half so great a blow to hear, 
As will a chesnut in a farmer's fire ? " 

Not all Petruchio's rhetoric would persuade more than " some 
dozen followers " to be of this heretical way of thinking. He 
unfolds his scheme for the Taming of the Shrew, on a principle 
of contradiction, thus : — 

" I'll woo her with some spirit when she comes. 
Say that she rail, why then I '11 tell her plain 
She sings as sweetly as a nightingale ; 
Say that she frown, I '11 say she looks as clear 
As morning roses newly wash'd with dew ; 
Say she be mute, and will not speak a word, 
Then I '11 commend her volubility. 
And say she uttereth piercing eloquence : 
If she do bid me pack, I '11 give her thanks, 
As tho' she bid me stay by her a week ; 
If she deny to wed, I '11 crave the day, 
When I shall ask the banns, and when be married ? " 

He accordingly gains her consent to the match, by telling her 
father that he has got it ; disappoints her by not returning at the 
time he has promised to wed her, and when he returns, creates no 
small consternation by the oddity of his dress and equipage. 
This however is nothing to the astonishment excited by his mad- 
brained behavior at the marriage. Here is the account of it by 
an eye-witness : — 

" Gremio. Tut, she's a lamb, a dove, a fool to him : 
I '11 tell you. Sir Lucentio ; when the priest 
Should ask if Katherine should be his wife ? 
Ay, by gog's woons, quoth he ; and swore so loud, 
That, all amaz'd, the priest let fall the book ; 
And as he stooped again to take it up. 
This mad-brain'd bridegroom took him such a cuff, 
That down fell priest and book, and book and priest. 
Now take them up, quoth he, if any list. 

Tranio. What said the wench when he rose up again ? 

Gremio. Trembled and shook ; for why, he stamp'd and swore. 
As if the vicar meant to cozen him. 
But after many ceremonies done. 
He calls for wine : a health, quoth he ; as if 
He 'ad been aboard carousing with his mates 



204 THE TAMING OF THE SHREW. 

After a storm ; quaft off the muscadel. 

And threw the sops all in the sexton's face ; 

Having no other cause but that his beard 

Grew thin and hungerly, and seem'd to ask 

His sops as he was drinking. This done, he took 

The bride about the neck, and kiss'd her lips 

With such a clamorous smack, that at their parting 

All the church echoed : and I seeing this. 

Came thence for very shame ; and after me, 

I know, the rout is coming ; 

Such a mad marriage never was before !" 

The most striking and at the same time laughable feature in 
the character of Petruchio throughout is the studied approxima- 
tion to the intractable character of real madness, his apparent 
insensibility to all external considerations, and utter indifference 
to everything but the wild and extravagant freaks of his own 
self-will. There is no contending with a person on whom nothing 
makes an impression but his own purposes, and who is bent on 
his own whims just in proportion as they seem to want common 
sense. With him a thing's being plain and reasonable is a rea- 
son against it. The airs he gives himself are infinite, and his 
caprices as sudden as they are groundless. The whole of his 
treatment of his wife at home is in the same spirit of ironical 
attention and inverted gallantry. Everything flies before his 
will, like a conjuror's wand, and he only metamorphoses his 
wife's temper by metamorphosing her senses and all the objects 
she looks upon at a word's speaking. Such are his insisting that 
it is the moon, and not the sun, which they see, &c. This ex- 
travagance reaches its most pleasant and poetical height in the 
scene where, on their return to her father's, they meet old Vin- 
centio, whom Petruchio immediately addresses as a young lady : 

•• Petruchio. Good morrow, gentle mistress, where away ? 
Tell me, sweet Kate, and tell me truly too. 
Hast thou beheld a fresher gentlewoman ? 
Such war of white and red within her cheeks; 
What stars do spangle heaven with such beauty, 
As those two eyes become that heavenly face ? 
Fair lovely maid, once more good day to thee: 
Sweet Kate, embrace her for her beauty's sake. 

HoRTENsio. He'll make the man mad to make a woman of him. 



THE TAMING OF THE SHREW. 205 

Katherine. Young budding virgin, fair and fresh and sweet. 
Whither away, or where is thy abode ? 
Happy the parents of so fair a child ; 
Happier the man whom favorable stars 
Allot thee for his lovely bed-fellow. 

Petruchio. Why, how now, Kate, I hope thou art not mad : 
This is a man, old, wrinkled, faded, wither'd. 
And not a maiden, as thou say'st he is. 

Katherine. Pardon, old father, my mistaken eyes. 
That have been so bedazzled with the sun 
That everything I look on seemeth green. 
Now I perceive thou art a reverend father. " 

The whole is carried off with equal spirit, as if the poet's comic 
Muse had wings of fire. It is strange how one man could be so 
many things ; but so it is. The concluding scene, in which trial 
is made of the obedience of the new-married wives (so trium- 
phantly for Petruchio) is a very happy one. — In some parts of 
this play there is a little too much about music-masters and mas- 
ters of philosophy. They were things of greater rarity in those 
days than they are now. Nothing, however, can be better than 
the advice which Tranio gives his master for the prosecution of 
his studies ; — 

" The mathematics, and the metaphysics. 
Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you : 
No profit grows, where is no pleasure ta'en : 
In brief, sir, study what you most affect." 

We have heard the Honey-Moon called " an elegant Katherine 
and Petruchio." We suspect we do not understand this word 
elegant in the sense that many people do. But in our sense of 
the word, we should call Lucentio's description of his mistress 
elegant : — 

" Tranio, I saw her coral lips to move, 
And with her breath she did perfume the air : 
Sacred and sweet was all I saw in her." 

When Biondello tells the same Lucentio for his encouragement, 
" I knew a wench married in an afternoon as she went to the 
garden for parsley to stuff a rabbit, and so may you, sir ;" — there 



206 THE TAMING OF THE SHREW. 

is nothing elegant in this, and yet we hardly know which of the 
two passages is the best. 

The Taming of the Shrew is a play within a play. It is 
supposed to be a play acted for the benefit of Sly the tinker, 
who is made to believe himself a lord, when he wakes after a 
drunken brawl. The character of Sly, and the remarks with 
which he accompanies the play, are as good as the play itself. 
His answer, when he is asked how he likes it, " Indifferent well ; 
'tis a good piece of work, would 'twere done," is in good keep- 
ing, as if he were thinking of his Saturday night's job. Sly 
does not change his tastes with his new situation, but in the midst 
of splendor and luxury still calls out lustily and repeatedly " for 
a pot o' the smallest ale." He is very slow in giving up his 
personal identity in his sudden advancement — " I am Christo- 
phero Sly, call me not honor nor lordship. I ne'er drank sack 
in my life : and if you give me any conserves, give me conserves 
of beef: ne'er ask me what raiment I'll wear, for I have no 
more doublets than backs, no more stockings than legs, nor no 
more shoes than feet, nay, sometimes more feet than shoes, or 
such shoes as my toes look through the over-leather. What, 
would you make me mad ? Am not I Christophero Sly, old 
Sly's son of Burton-heath, by birth a pedlar, by education a card- 
maker, by transmutation a bear-herd, and now by present pro- 
fession a tinker ? Ask Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Win- 
cot, if she know me not ; if she say I am not fourteen-pence on 
the score for sheer ale, score me up for the lying'st knave in 
Christendom." 

This is honest. " The Slies are no rogues," as he says of 
himself We have a great predilection for this representative 
of the family ; and what makes us like him the better is, that 
we take him to be of kin (not many degrees removed) toSancho 
Panza. 



MEASURE FOR MEASURE. 207 



MEASURE FOR MEASURE. 



This is a play as full of genius as it is of wisdom. Yet there 
is an original sin in the nature of the subject, which prevents us 
from taking a cordial interest in it. " The height of moral ar- 
gument" which the author has here maintained in the intervals 
of passion, or blended with the more powerful impulses of nature, 
is hardly surpassed in any of his plays. But there is in general 
a want of passion ; the affections are at a stand ; our sympathies 
are repulsed and defeated in all directions. The only passion 
which influences the story is that of Angelo ; and yet he seems 
to have a much greater passion for hypocrisy than for his mis- 
tress. Neither are we greatly enamored of Isabella's rigid 
chastity, though she could not act otherwise than she did. We 
do not feel the same confidence in the virtue that is " sublimely 
good " at another's expense, as if it had been put to some less 
disinterested trial. As to the Duke, who makes a very imposing 
and mysterious stage-character, he is more absorbed in his own 
plots and gravity than anxious for the welfare of the state ; more 
tenacious of his own character than attentive to the feelings and 
apprehensions of others. Claudio is the only person who feels 
naturally ; and yet he is placed in circumstances of distress 
which almost preclude the wish for his deliverance. Mariana 
is also in love with Angelo, whom we hate. In this respect, 
there may be said to be a general system of cross-purposes be- 
tween the feelings of the different characters and the sympathy 
of the reader or the audience. This principle of repugnance 
seems to have reached its height in the character of Master Bar- 
nardine, who not only sets at defiance the opinions of others, 
but has even thrown off all self-regard, — '' one that apprehends 



20S MEASURE FOR MEASURE. 

death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep ; careless, 
reckless, and fearless of what's past, present, and to come." He 
is a fine antithesis to the morality and hypocrisy of the other 
characters of the play. Barnardine is Caliban transported from 
Prospero's wizard island to the forests of Bohemia or the prisons 
of Vienna. He is a creature of bad habits, as Caliban is of 
gross instincts. He has, however, a strong notion of the natural 
fitness of things, according to his own sensations — " He has been 
drinking hard all night, and he will not be hanged that day " — 
and Shakspeare has let him off at last. We do not understand 
why the philosophical German critic, Schlegel, should be so 
severe on those pleasant persons, Lucio, Pompey, and Master 
Froth, as to call them " wretches." They appear all mighty 
comfortable in their occupations, and determined to pursue them, 
" as the flesh and fortune shall serve." A very good exposure 
of the want of self-knowledge and contempt for others, which is 
so common in this world, is put into the mouth of Abhorson, the 
jailor, when the Provost proposes to associate Pompey with him 
in his office — " A bawd, sir ? Fie upon him, he will discredit 
our mystery." And the same answer would serve, in nine instances 
out of ten, to the same kind of remark, " Go to, sir, you weigh 
equally ; a feather will turn the scale." Shakspeare was in one 
.sense the least moral of all writers ; for morality (commonly so 
called) is made up of antipathies ; and his talent consisted in 
sympathy with human nature, in all its shapes, degrees, depres- 
sions, and elevations. The object of the pedantic moralist is to 
find out the bad in everything : his was to show that " there is 
some soul of goodness in things evil." Even Master Barnardine 
is not left to the mercy of what others think of him ; but, when 
he comes in, speaks for himself, and pleads his own cause, as 
well as if counsel had been assigned him. In one sense, Shak- 
speare was no moralist at all : in another, he was the greatest 
of all moralists. He was a moralist in the same sense in which 
nature is one. He taught what he had learnt from her. He 
showed the greatest knowledge of humanity, with the greatest 
fellow-feeling for it. 

One of the most dramatic passages in the present play is the 
interview between Claudio and his sister, when she comes to 



MEASURE FOR MEASURE. 200 

inform him of the conditions on which Angelo will spare his 
life. . ^ . 

" CiiATjDio. Let me know the point. 
Isabella. 0, I do fear thee, Claudio: and I quake, 
Lest thou a feverous life should'st entertain, 
And six or seven winters more respect 
Than a perpetual honor. Dar'st thou die ? 
The sense of death is most in apprehension ; 
And the poor beetle, that we tread upon. 
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great 
As when a giant dies. 

Claudio. Why give you me this shame .- 
Think you I can a resolution fetch 
From flowery tenderness ; if I must die, 
I will encounter darkness as a bride, 
And hug it in mine arms. 

Isabella. There spake my brother ! there my father's grave 
Did utter forth a voice ! Yes, thou must die : 
Thou art too noble to conserve a life 
In base appliances. This outward-sainted deputy — 
Whose settled visage and deliberate word 
Nips youth i' the head, and follies doth emmew. 
As falcon doth the fowl — is yet a devil. 

CLAxrDio. The princely Angelo ? 

Isabella. Oh, 'tis the cunning livery of hell, 
The damned'st body to invest and cover 
In princely guards ! Dost thou think, Claudio, 
If I would yield him my virginity, 
Thou might'st be freed ? 

Claudio. Oh heavens ! it cannot be. 

Isabella. Yes, he would give it thee, for this rank offence, 
So to offend him still : this night's the time 
That I should do what I abhor to name. 
Or else thou dy'st to morrow, 

Claudio. Thou shalt not do 't. 

Isabella. Oh, were it but my life, 
I'd throw it down for your deliverance 
As frankly as a pin. 

Claudio. Thanks, dear Isabel. 

Isabella Be ready, Claudio, for your death to-rnorrow. 

Claudio. Yes.- -Has he affections in him, 
That thus can make him bite the law by the nose ? 
When he would force it, sure it is no sin ; 
Or of the deadly seven it is the least. 

Isabella. Which is the least ? 
15 



'jio . ^ii: AS Li::: for measure. 



Claudio. If it were damnable, he, being so wise, 
Why would he for the momentary trick 
Be perdurably fin'd ? Oh, Isabel ! 

Isabella. What says my brother ? 

Claudio. Death is a fearful thing, 

Isabella. And shamed life a hateful. 

Claudio. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where ; 
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot ; 
This sensible warm motion to become 
A kneaded clod ; and the delighted spirit 
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside 
In thrilling regions of thick -ribbed ice; 
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds. 
And blown with restless violence round about 
The pendant world; or to be worse than worst 
Of those, that lawless and incertain thoughts 
Imagine howling ! — 'tis too horrible ! 
The weariest and most loathed worldly life. 
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment 
Can lay on nature, is a paradise 
To what we fear of death. 

Isabella. Alas ! alas ! 

Claudio. Sv/eet sister, let me live : 
What sin you do to save a brother's life, 
Nature dispenses with the deed so far, 
That it becomes a virtue." 

What adds to the dramatic beauty of this scene and the efTect 
of Claudio's passionate attachment to life is, that it immediately 
follows the Duke's lecture to him, in the character of the Friar, 
recommending an absolute indilTerence to it. 

— •' Roason thus with life, — 
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing 
That none but fools would keep : a breath thou art, 
Servile to all the skyey influences 
That do this habitation, where thou keep'st. 
Hourly afflict : merely, thou art death's fool ; 
For him thou labor'st by thy flight to shun. 
And yet run'st tov/ard him still ; thou art not noble ; 
For all the accommodations, that thou bear'st, 
Are nurs'd by baseness : thou art by no means valiant ; 
For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork 
Of a poor worm : thy best of rest is sleep. 
And that thou oft provok'st ; yet grossly fear'st 



.AiEASURE FOR MEASURE. 211 



Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself: 

For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains 

That issue out of dust : happy thou art not ; 

For what thou hast not, still thou striv'st to get ; ^ 

And what thou hast, forget'st ; thou art not certain ; 

For thy complexion sV.ifts to strange effects. 

After the moon ; if thou art rich, thou art poor ; 

For, like an ass, whose back with ingots bows. 

Thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey, 

And death unloads thee : friend thou hast none ; 

For thy own bowels which do call thee sire, 

The mere effusion of thy proper loins. 

Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum. 

For ending thee no sooner : thou hast nor youth, nor age ; 

But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep. 

Dreaming on both : for all thy blessed youth. 

Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms 

Of palsied eld ; and when thou art old and rich, 

Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty. 

To make thy riches pleasant. What's yet in this. 

That bears the name of life ? Yet in this life 

Lie hid more thousand deaths ; yet death we fear. 

That makes these odds all even." 



THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR. 



THE 



MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR 



The Merry Wives of Windsor is no doubt a very amusing 
play, with a great deal of humor, character, and nature in it ; 
but we should have liked it much better, if any one else had 
been the hero of it, instead of Falstaff. We could have been 
contented if Shakspeare had not been '• commanded to show the 
knight in love." Wits and philosophers, for the most part, do 
Jiot shine in that character; and JSir John himself, by no means^. 
comes off with flying colors. Many people complain of the 
degradation and insults to which Don Quixote is so frequently 
exposed in his various adventures. But what are the uncon- 
scious indignities which he suffers, compared with the sensible 
mortifications which Falstaff is made to bring upon himself? 
Wiiat are the blows and buffetings which the Don receives from 
the staves of Yanguesian carriers, or from Sancho Fanza's more 
hard-hearted hands, compared with the contamination of the 
buck-basket, the disguise of the fat woman of Brentford, and the 
horns of Heme the huiiter, which are discovered on Sir John's 
head ? In reading the play, we indeed wish him well througli 
all these discomfitures, but it would have been as well if he Ijad 
not got into them. Falstaff, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, 
is not the man he was in the two parts of Henry IV. His wit 
and eloquence have left him. Instead of making a butt of others, 
he is made a butt of by them. Neither is there a single particle 
of love in him to excuse his follies ; he is merely a designing, 
bare-faced knave, ai^d en unsuccessful one. The scene with 
Ford as Master Brook, aud that v ith Simple, Slender's man. 



THE MERRY WIVES 0? WINDSOI^ 



wlio comes to ask after the Wise Woman, arc alnnst t.ie only 
ones in which his old intellectual ascendency appears. He is 
like a person recalled to the stage to perform an imaccustomci 
and ungracious part; and in which we perceive only " some 
faint sparks of those flashes of merriment, that were wont to set 
the hearers in a roar." But the single scene with Doll Tear- 
sheet or Mrs. Quickly's account of his desiring " to eat some ot 
housewife Reach's prawns," and telling her -to be no more so 
familiarity with such people," is worth the whole of The Merry 
Wives of Windsor put together. Ford's jealousy, which is 
the mainspring of the comic incidents, is certainly very well 
manacred. Page, on the contrary, appears to be somewhat 
uxorious in his disposition ; and we have pretty plain indication 
of the effect of the characters of the husbands on the ditierent 
degrees of fidelity in their wives. Mrs. Quickly makes a very 
lively fifo-betwecn, both between Falstairand his Dulcineas, and 
Anne Pacre and her lovers, and seems in the latter case so intent 
on her own interest as totally to overlook the intentions of her 
<Mnployers. Her master, Doctor Caius, the Frenchman, and her 
fellow-servant. Jack Rugby, are very completely described. 
This last-meotioned person is rather quaintly commended by 
Mrs Quickly, as - an honest, willing, kind fellow, as ever 
servant shall come in house withal, and T warrant you, no tell- 
tale nor no breed-bate; his worst fault is that he is given to 
prayer ; he is something peevish that way ; but nobody but has 
his fault " The Welsh Parson, Sir Hugh Evans (a title which 
in those days was given to the clergy), is an excellent character 
in all respects. He is as respectable as he is laughable. He 
has '' very o-ood discretions and very odd humors. ' ihe due:- 
scene with Caius gives him an opportunity to show his " cholers 
and his tremblings of mind," his valor and his melancholy, in an 
irresistible manner. In the dialogue, which at his mothers 
request he holds with his pupil, William Page, to show his pro- 
<xress in learning, it is hard to say whether the simplicity of the 
master or the scholar is the greatest. Nym, Bardolph, and Pis- 
tol are but the shadows of what they were ; and Justice Shallow 
himself has little of his consequence left. But his cousin, 
Slender, makes up for the deficiency. He is a very potent piece 



211 THE MERRY WIVES OI-^ WINDSOR. 



of imbecility. In him the pretensions of the worthy Gloucester- 
shire family are well kept up, and immortalised. He and his 
friend Sackerson, and his book of songs, and his love of Anne 
Page, and his having nothing to say to her, can never be for- 
gotten. It is the only first-rate character in the play. Shak- 
speare is the only writer who was as great in describing weak- 
ness as strength. 



THE COMEDY OF ERRORS. 215 



THE COMEDY OF EEROES- 



This comedy is taken very much from the IMensechmi of Plau- 
tus, and is not an improvement on it. Shakspeare appears ta 
have bestowed no great pains on it, and there are but a few pas- 
sages which bear the decided stamp of his genius. He seems 
to have relied on his author, and on the interest arising out of 
the intricacy of the plot. The curiosity excited is certainly verv 
considerable, though not of the most pleasing kind. We are 
teazed as with a riddle, which notwithstanding we try to solve. 
In reading the play, from the sameness of the names of the two 
Antipholises and the two Dromios. as Vv-ell from their being con- 
stantly taken for each other by those who see them, it is difficult, 
w^ithout a painful effort of attention, to keep the characters dis- 
tinct in the mind. And again, on the stage, either the com- 
plete similarity of their persons and dress must produce the same 
perplexity whenever they first enter, or the identity of appear- 
ance wiiich the story supposes will be destroyed. We still, how- 
ever, having a clue to the difficulty, can tell which is which, 
merely from the practical contradictions which arise, as soon as 
the different parties begin to speak ; and w^e are indemnified for 
the perplexity and blunders into which we are thrown by 
seeing others thrown into greater and almost inextricable ones. 
This play (among other considerations) leads us not to feel much 
regret that Shakspeare was not w^hat is called a classical scholar. 
We do not think his forte would ever have lain in imitating or 
improving on v/hat others invented, so much as in inventing for 
himself, and perfecting what he invented, — not perhaps by the 
omission of faults, but by the addition of the highest excellen- 
ces. His own genius was strong enough to bear him up, and 



•216 THE COMEDY OF ERRORS. 



tie soared longest and best on unborrowed plumes. The onlv 
passage of a very Shakspearian cast in this comedy is the one 
in which the Abbess, with admirable characteristic artifice, 
makes Adriana confess her own misconduct in driving her hus- 
band mad. 

" Abbess. How long hath this possession held the man ? 

Adriana. This week he hath been heavy, sour, sad. 
And much, much diiierent from the man he was ; 
But, till this afternoon, his passion 
Ne'er brake into extremity of rage. 

Abbess, Hath he not lost much wealth by wreck at sea ? 
Bury'd some dear friend ? Hath not else his eye 
Stray'd his affection in unlawful love ? 
A sin prevailing much in youthful men. 
Who give their eyes the liberty of gazing 
Which of these sorrows is he subject to ? 

Adriana. To none of these, except it be the last : 
Namely, some love, that drew him oft from home. 

Abbess- You should for that have reprehended him. 

Adriana. Why, so I did. 

Abbess. But not rough enough. 

Adriana. As roughly as my modesty would let me. 

Abbess. Hapily, in private. 

Adriana. And in assemblies too. 

Abbess. Ay, but not enough. 

Adriana. It was the copy of our conference : 
In bed, he slept not for my urging it ; 
At board, he fed not for my urging it ; 
Alone it was the subject of my theme ; 
In company, I often glanc'd at it ; 
Still did I tell him it was vile and bad. 

Abbess. And therefore came it that the man was mad : 
The venomed clamors of a jealous woman 
Poison more deadly than a mad dog's tooth. 
It seems, his sleeps were hinder'd by thy railing : 
And therefore comes it that his head is light. 
Thou say'st his meat was sauc'd with thy upbraidings : 
Unquiet meals make ill digestions, 
Therefore the raging fire of fever bred : 
And what's a fever but a fit of madness .' 
Thou say'st his sports were hinder'd by thy brawls : 
Sweet recreation barr'd, what doth ensue, 
But moody and dull melancholy. 
Kinsman to grim and comfortless despair ; 



THE COMEDY OF ERRORS. 217 



And, at hcv heels, a huge infectious troop 
Of pale distemperatures, and foes to life ; 
In food, in sport, and life-preserving rest 
To be disturb' d, would mad or man or beast : 
The consequence is then, thy jealous fits 
Have scar'd thy husband from the use of wits. 

LuciANA. She never reprehended him but mildly, 
When he demeaned himself rough, rude and wildly. — 
Why bear you these rebukes and answer not ? 
Adriaxa."^ She did betray me to my own reproof." 

Pinch the conjuror is also an CAcrescence not to be found in 
Plautus. He is indeed a very formidable anachronism. 

" They brought one Pinch, a hungry, leau-fac'd villain, 
A meer anatomy, a mountebank, 
A thread-bare juggler and a fortune-teller, 
A needy, hollow-eyed, sharp-looking wretch, 
A living dead man." 

This is exactly like some of the Puritanical portraits to be met 
with in Hogarth. 



2)8 DOUBTFUL PLAYS. 



DOUBTFUL PLAYS OF 

OF 

SHAKSPEARE. 



We shall give for the satisfaction of the reader what the cele- 
brated German critic, Schlegel, says on this subject, and then 
add a very few remarks of our own. 

" All the editoi's, with the exception of Capell, are unanimous 
in rejecting T'dus Andronicus as unworthy of Shakspeare, though 
they always allow it to be printed with the other pieces, as the 
scape-goat, as it were, of their abusive criticism. The correct 
method in such an investigation is first to examine into the exter- 
nal grounds, evidences, &c., and to weigh their worth ; and then 
to adduce the internal reasons derived from the quality of the 
work. The critics of Shakspeare follow a course directly the 
reverse of this ; they set out with a preconceived opinion 
against a piece, and seek, in justification of this opinion, to render 
the historical grounds suspicious, and to set them aside. Tilus 
Andronicus is to be found in the first folio edition of Shakspeare's 
works, which it is known was conducted by Heminge and Con- 
dcll, for many years his friends, and fellow-managers of the 
same theatre. Is it possible to persuade ourselves that they 
would not have known if a piece in their repertory did or did 
not actually belong to Shakspeare ? And are we to lay to the 
charge of these honorable men a designed fraud in this single 
case, when we know that they did not show themselves so very- 
desirous of scraping everything together which went by the 



D0L"3TFUL PLAYS. oVj 

name of Shakspeare, but. as it appears, merely gave those plays 
of which they had manuscripts in hand ? Yet the following cir- 
cumstance is sliil stronger : George Meres, a contemporary and 
admirer of Shakspeare, mentions Titus Andronicus in an enu- 
meration of his works, in the year 1598. Meres was personally 
acquainted with the poet, and so very intimately, that the latter 
read over to him his sonnets before they were printed. I can- 
not conceive that all the critical scepticism in the world would 
be sufficient to get over such a testimony. 

" This tragedy, it is true, is framed according to a false idea 
of the tragic, which by an accumulation of cruelties and enor- 
mities degenerates into the horrible, and yet leaves no deep im- 
pression behind : the story of Tereus and Philomela is height- 
ened and overcharged under other names, and mixed up with 
the repast of Atreus and Thycstes, and many other incidents. 
In detail there is no want of beautiful lines, bold images, nay, 
even features which betray the peculiar conception of Shak- 
speare, Among these we may reckon the joy of the treache- 
rous Moor at the blackness and uo-liness of his child bec^ot in 
adultery ; and in the compassion of Titus Andronicus, grown 
childish through grief, for a fly which had been struck dead, 
and his rage afterwards when he imagines he discovers in it his 
black enemy, we recognize the future poet of Lear. Are the 
critics afraid that Shakspeare's fame would be injured, were it 
established that in his early youth he ushered into the world a 
feeble and immature work ? Was Rome less the conqueror of 
the world because Remus could leap over its first walls ? Let 
any one place himself in Shakspeare's situation at the com- 
mencement of his career. He found only a few indifferent mo- 
dels, and yet these met with the most favorable reception, be- 
cause men are never difficult to please in the novelty of an art 
before their taste has become fastidious from choice and abun- 
dance. Must not this situation have had its influence on him 
before he learned to make higher demands on himself, and by 
digging deeper in his own mind, discovered the richest veins of 
a noble metal 1 It is even highly probable that he must have 
made several failures before getting into the right path. Ge- 
nius is in a certain sense infallible, and has nothin^r to learn : 



220 DOUBTFCL FLAYS. 



but art is to be learned, and must be acquired by practice and ex- 
perience. In Shakspeare's acknowledged works we find hardly 
any traces of his apprenticeship, and yet an apprenticeship he 
certainly had. This every artist must have, and especially in a 
period where he has not before him the example of a school already 
formed. 1 consider it as extremely probable, that Shakspeare be- 
gan to write for the theatre at a much earlier period than the one 
which is generally stated, namely, the year 1590. It appears that, 
as early as the year 1584, when only twenty years of age, he had 
left his paternal home and repaired to London. Can we imagine 
that such an active head would remain idle for six whole years 
without making any attempt to emerge by his talents from an 
uncongenial situation ? That in the dedication of the poem of 
Venus and Adonis he calls it ' the first heir of his invention,' 
proves nothing against the supposition. It was the first which 
he printed ; he might have composed it at an earlier period ; 
perhaps, also, he did not include theatrical labors, as they then 
possessed but little literary dignity. The earlier Shakspeare 
began to compose for the theatre, the less are we enabled to con- 
sider the immaturity and imperfection of a work as a proof of 
its spuriousness, in opposition to historical evidence, if we only 
find in it prominent features of his mind. Several of the works 
rejected as spurious may still have been produced in the period 
betwixt Titus Andronicus, and the earliest of the acknowledged 
pieces. 

" At last, Steevens published seven pieces ascribed to Shaks- 
peare in two supplementary volumes. It is to be remarked, that 
they all appeared in print in Shakspeare's life-time, with his 
name prefixed at full length. They are the following : — 

"1. Locriiie. The proofs of the genuineness of this piece 
are not altogether unambiguous ; the grounds for doubt, on the 
other hand, are entitled to attention. However, this question is 
immediately connected with that respecting Titus Andronicus. 
and must be at the same time resolved in the affirmative or ne- 
gative. 

" 2. Pericles, Prince of Tyre. This piece was acknowledged 
by Dryden, but as a youthful work of Shakspeare. It is most 
undoubtedly his, and it has been admhted into several of the 



DOUBTFUL PLAYS. 22! 



late editions. The supposed imperfections originate in the cir- 
cumstance, that Shakspeare here handled a childish and extra- 
vagant romance of the old poet Gower, and was unwilling to 
drag the subject out of its proper sphere. Hence he even intro- 
duces Gower himself, and makes him deliver a prologue entirely 
in his antiquated language and versification. This power of 
assuming so foreign a manner is at least no proof of helpless- 
ness. 

" 3. The London Prodigal. If we are not mistaken, Lessing 
pronounced this piece to be Shakspeare's, and wished to bring it 
on the German stage. 

" 4. The Puritan ; or, the Widow of Watling Street. One of 
my literary friends, intimately acquainted with Shakspeare, v,^as 
of opinion that the poet must have wished to write a play for 
once in the style of Ben Jonson, and that in this way we must 
account for the difference between the present piece and his 
usual manner. To follow out this idea, however, would lead 
to a very nice critical investigation. 

"5. Thomas, Lord Cromwell. 

" G. Sir John Oldcaslle, First Part. 

"7. A Yorkshire Tragedy. 

" The three last pieces are not only unquestionably Shakspeare's, 
but in my opinion they deserve to be classed among his best 
and maturest works. Steevens admits at last, in some degree, 
that they are Shakspeare's, as well as the others, excepting Lo- 
crine, but he speaks of all of them whh great contempt, as quite 
worthless productions. This condemnatory sentence is not, 
however, in the slightest degree convincing, nor is it supported 
by a critical acumen. I should like to see how such a critic 
would, of his own natural suggestion, have decided on Shaks- 
peare's acknowledged master-pieces, and what he would have 
thought of praising in them, had the public opinion not imposed 
on him the duty of admiration. Thomas, Lord Cromwell, and Sir 
John Oldcasile, are biographical dramas, and models in this 
species : the first is linked, from its subject, to Henry the Eighth, 
and the second io Henry the Fifth. The second part of Oldcas- 
ile is wanting ; I know not whether a copy of the old edition 
has been discovered in England, or whether it is lost. The 



^22 DOUBTFUL PLAYS. 



Yorkshire Tragedy is a tragedy in one act, a dramatised tale of 
murder : the tragical effect is overpowering, and it is extremely 
important to see how poetically Shakspeare could handle such a 
subject. 

" There have been still farther ascribed to him : — 1st. The 
Merry Devil of Edmonton, a comedy in one act, printed in Dods- 
ley's old plays. This has certainly some appearances in its 
favor. It contains a merry landlord, who bears a great similar- 
ity to the one in the Merry Wives of Windsor. However, at 
all events, though an ingenious, it is but a hasty sketch. 2d. 
The Accusation of Paris. 3d. The Birth of Merlin. 4th. Ed- 
zDard the Third. 5th. The Fair Emma. 6th. Mucedorus. 7th. 
Arden of Fever sham. I have never seen any of these, and can- 
not therefore say anything respecting them. From the passages 
cited, I am led to conjecture that the subject o^ Mucedorus is the 
popular story of Valentine and Orson ; a beautiful subject, 
which Lope de Vega has also taken for a play. Arden of Fe- 
versham is said to be a tragedy on the story of a man, from 
v/hom the poet was descended by the mother's side. If the 
quality of the piece is not too directly at variance Avith this 
claim, the circumstance would afford an additional probability 
in its favor. For such motives were not foreign to Shakspeare : 
he treated Henry the Seventh, who bestowed lands on his fore- 
fathers for services performed by them, with a visible partiality. 

'' Whoever takes from Shakspeare a play early ascribed to 
him, and confessedly belonging to his time, is unquestionably 
bound to answer, with some degree of probability, this question : 
who did write it ? Shakspeare's competitors in the dramatic 
walk are pretty well known, and if those of them who have even 
acquired a considerable name, a Lily, a Marlowe, a Hey wood, 
are still so very far below him, we can hardly imagine that the 
author of a work, which rises so high beyond theirs, would have 
remained unknown." — Lectures on Dramatic Literature, vol. ii., 
p. 252. 

We agree to the truth of this last observation, but not to the 
justice of its application to some of the plays here mentioned. It 
is true that Shakspeare's best works are very superior to those of 
Marlowe or Heywood, but it is not true that the best of the 



BOUBTri-L PLAYS. 223 

doubtful plays above enumerated are superior or even equal to 
the best of theirs. The Yorkshire Tragedy, which Schlegel 
speaks of as an undoubted production of our author's, is much 
more in the manner of Heywood than of Shakspeare. The ef- 
fect is indeed overpowering, but the mode of producing it is by 
no means poetical. The praise which Schlegel give to Thomas, 
Lord Cromwell, and to Sir John Oldcastle, is altogether exagge- 
rated. They are very indifferent compositions, which have not 
the slightest pretensions to rank with Henry V. or Henry VIII. 
We suspect that the German critic was not very well acquainted 
with the dramatic contemporaries of Shakspeare, or aware of 
their general merits; and that accordingly he mistakes a resem- 
blance in style and manner for an equal degree of excellence. 
Shakspeare differed from the other writers of his age not in the 
treating of his subjects, but in the grace and power which he dis- 
played in them. The reason assigned by a literary friend of 
Schlegel's for supposing The Puritan ; or, the Widow of Wat- 
ling Street, to be Shakspeare's, viz., that it is in the style of Ben 
.lonson, that is to say, in a style just the reverse of his own, is 
not very satisfactory to a plain English understanding. Locrine, 
and The London Prodigal, if they were Shakspeare's at all, must 
have been among the sins of his youth. Arden of Fevershani 
contains several striking passages, but the passion which they 
express is rather that of a sanguine temperament than of a lofty 
imagination ; and in this respect they approximate more nearly 
to the style of other writers of the time than to Shakspeare's. 
Titus Andronicus is certainly as unlike Shakspeare's usual style 
as it is possible. It is an accumulation of vulgar physical hor- 
rors, in which the power exercised by the poet bears no proportion 
to the repugnance excited by the subject. The character of 
Aaron the Moor is the only thing which shows any originality of 
conception ; and the scene in which he expresses his joy " at 
the blackness and ugliness of his child begot in adultery," the 
only one worthy of Shakspeare. Even this is worthy of him only 
in the display of power, for it gives no pleasure. Shakspeare 
managed these things differently. Nor do we think it a sufficient 
answer to say that this was an embryo or crude production of the 
author. In its kind it is full grown, and its features decided 



224 DOUBTFUL PLAYS 



and overcharged. It is not like a first imperfect essay, but 
shows a confirmed habit, a systematic preference of violent efl^ect 
to everything else. There are occasional detached images of 
great beauty and delicacy, but these were not beyond the powers 
of other writers then living. The circumstance which inclines 
us to reject the external evidence in favor of this play being 
Shakspeare's is, that the grammatical construction is constantly 
false and mixed up with vulgar abbreviations, a fault that never 
occurs in any of his genuine plays. A similar defect, and the 
halting measure of the verse, are the chief objections to Pericles 
of Tyre, if we except the far-fetched and complicated absurdity 
of the story. The movement of the thoughts and passions has 
something in it not unlike Shakspeare, and several of the de- 
scriptions are either the original hints of passages which Shak- 
speare has ingrafted on his other plays, or are imitations of them 
by some cotemporary poet. The most memorable idea in it is in 
Marina's speech, where she compares tlie world to a " lasting 
storm, hurrvinfT her from her friends." 



POEMS AND SONNETS. 225 



POEMS AND SONNETS 



Our idolatry of Shakspeare (not to say our admiration) ceases 
with his plays. In his other productions, he was a mere author, 
though not a common author. It was only by representing 
others, that he became himself. He could go out of himself, 
and express the soul of Cleopatra ; but in his own person, he ap- 
peared to be always waiting for the prompter's cue. In express- 
ing the thoughts of others, he seemed inspired ; in expressing 
his own, he was a mechanic. The licence of an assumed cha- 
racter was necessary to restore his genius to the privileges of 
nature, and to give him courage to break through the tyranny of 
fashion, the trammels of custom. In his plays, he was "as 
broad and casing as the general air :" in his poems, on the con- 
trary, he appears to be " cooped, and cabined in " by all the 
technicalities of art, by all the petty intricacies of thought and 
language which poetry had learned from the controversial jargon 
of the schools, where words had been made a substitute for things. 
There was, if we mistake not, something of modesty, and a pain- 
ful sense of personal propriety at the bottom of this. Shak- 
speare's imagination, by identifying itself with the strongest cha- 
racters in the most trying circumstances, grappled at once with 
nature, and trampled the littleness of art under his feet : the 
rapid changes of situation, the wide range of the universe, gave 
him life and spirit, and afforded him full scope to his genius ; but 
returned into his closet again, and having assumed the badge 
of his profession, he could only labor in his vocation, and con- 
form himself to existing models. The thoughts, the passions, 
the words which the poet's pen, " glancing from heaven to 
earth, from earth to heaven," lent to others, shook off the fetters 



226 POEMS AND SONNETS. 

of pedantry and affectation ; while his own thoughts and feel- 
ings, standing by themselves, were seized upon as lawful prey, 
and tortured to death according to the established rules and 
practice of the day. In a word, we do not like Shakspeare's 
poems, because we like his plays : the one, in all their excellen- 
ces, are just the reverse of the other. It has been the fashion of 
late to cry up our author's poems as equal to his plays : this is 
the desperate cant of modern criticism. We would ask, was 
there the slightest comparison between Shakspeare, and either 
Chaucer or Spenser, as mere poets ? Not any. — The two poems of 
Venus and Adonis and of Tarquin and Lucrece appear to us like 
a couple of ice-houses. They are about as hard, as glittering, 
and as cold. The author seems all the time to be thinking of 
his verses, and not of his subject, — not of what his characters 
would feel, but of what he shall say ; and as it must happen in 
all such cases, he always puts into their mouths those things 
which they would be the last to think of, and which it shows the 
greatest ingenuity in him to find out. The whole is labored, up- 
hill work. The poet is perpetually singling out the difficulties 
of the art to make an exhibition of his strength and skill in 
wrestling with them. He is making perpetual trials of them, as 
if his mastery over them were doubted. The images, which 
are often striking, are generally applied to things which they 
are the least like : so that they do not blend with the poem, but 
seem stuck upon it, like splendid patch-work, or remain quite 
distinct from it, like detached substances, painted and varnished 
over. A beautiful thought is sure to be lost in an endless com- 
mentary upon it. The speakers are like persons who have both 
leisure and inclination to make riddles on their own situation, 
and to twist and turn every object or incident into acrostics and 
anagrams. Everything is spun out into allegory ; and a digres- 
sion is always preferred to the main story. Sentiment is built 
up upon plays of words; the hero or heroine feels, not from the 
impulse of passion, but from the force of dialectics. There is 
besides a strange attempt to substitute the language of painting 
for that of poetry, to make us see their feelings in the faces of the 
persons ; and again, consistently with this, in the description of 
the picture in Tarquin and Lucrece, those circumstances are 



POEMS AND SONNETS. 227 

chiefly insisted on, which it would be impossible to convey except 
by words. The invocation to Opportunity in the Tarquin and 
Lucrece is full of thoughts and images, but at the same time it 
is over-loaded by them. The concluding stanza expresses all 
our objections to this kind of poetry : — 

" Oh ! idle words, servants to shallow fools ; 
Unprofitable sounds, weak arbitrators : 
Busy yourselves in skill-contending schools ; 
Debate when leisure serves with dull debaters ; 
To trembling clients be their mediators : 
For me I force not argument a straw. 
Since that my case is past all help of law." 

The description of the horse in Venus and Adonis has been 
particularly admired, and not without reason ; — 

" Round hoof d, short jointed, fetlocks shag and long. 
Broad breast, full eyes, small head and nostril wide, 
High crest, short ears, strait legs, and passing strong. 
Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide, 
Look what a horse should have, he did not lack, 
Save a proud rider on so proud a back." 

Now this inventory of perfections shows great knowledge of the 
horse ; and is good matter-of-fact poetry. Let the reader but 
compare it with a speech in The Midsummer Nighfs Dream 
where Theseus describes his liounds — 

" And their heads are hung 
With ears that sweep away the morning dew " — 

and he will perceive at once what we mean by the difference 
between Shakspeare's own poetry, and that of his plays. We 
prefer the Passionate Pilgrim very much to the Lover's Com- 
plaint. It has been doubted whether the latter poem is Shaks- 
peare's. 

Of the Sonnets we do not well know what to say. The sub- 
ject of them seems to be somewKat equivocal ; but many of them 
are highly beautiful in themselves, and interesting as they re- 
late to the state of the personal feelings of the author. The fol- 
lowing are some of the most striking : — 



228 POEMS AND SONNETS. 



CONSTANCY. 

" Let those who are in favor with their stars, 

Of public honor and proud titles boast, 

Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars, 

Unlook'd for joy in that I honor most. 

Great princes' favorites their fair leaves spread, 

But as the marigold in the sun's eye ; 

And in themselves their pride lies buried, 

For at a frown they in their glory die. 

The painful warrior famoused for fight, 

After a thousand victories once foil'd. 

Is from the book of honor razed quite, 

And all the rest forgot for which he toil'd : 
Then happy I, that love and am belov'd, 
Where I may not remove, nor be remov'd." 

love's consolation. 

" When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, 
I all alone beweep my out-cast state, 
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries. 
And look upon myself, and curse my fate. 
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, 
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd. 
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope. 
With what I most enjoy contented least: 
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, 
Haply I think on thee, — and then my state 
(Like to the lark at break of day arising 
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate : 
For thy sweet love remember'd, such wealth brings. 
That then I scorn to change my state with kings." 

NOVELTY. 

" My love is strengthen'd, though more weak in seeming 
I love not less, though less the show appear : 
That love is merchandis'd whose rich esteeming 
The owner's tongue doth publish everywhere. 
Our love was new, and then but in the spring, 
When I was wont to greet it with my lays : 
As Philomel in summer's front doth sing, 
And stops his pipe in growth of riper days : 



POEMS AND SONNETS. . 229 

Not that the summer is less pleasant now 
Than when her mournful hymns did hush the night, 
But that wild music burdens every bough, 
And sweets grown common lose their dear delight. 
Therefore, like her, I sometimes hold my tongue, 
Because I would not dull you with my song." 

life's decay. 

" That time of year thou mayst in me behold 
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang 
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, 
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. 
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day. 
As after sun-set fadeth in the west. 
Which by and by black night doth take away. 
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. 
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire. 
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, 
As the death-bed whereon it must expire, 
Consum'd with that which it w^as nourish'd by. 

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, 
To love that well which thou must leave ere long." 

In all these, as well as in many others, there is a mild tone 
of sentiment, deep, mellow, and sustained, very different from 
the crudeness of his earlier poems. 



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animal kingdom — 12. Maclay system of animated nature ; this 
system considered in connexion with the progress of organic crea- 
tion, and as indicating the natural status of man — 13. Early his- 
tory of mankind — 14. Mental constitution of animals — 15. Pur- 
pose and general condition of the animated creation — 16. Note 
conclusory. 

" This is a remarkable volume — small in compass — but embracing a wide 
range of inquiry, from worlds beyond the visible starry firmament, to the 
minutest structures of man and animals. The work is written with peculiar 

and cla-ssical terseness, reminding us very much of the style of Celsus ! 

We have dedicated a large space to this remarkable work, that may induce 
many of our readers to peruse the original. The author is, decidedly, a man 
I of great information and reflection." — Medico-Chirurgical Review. 

"This is a very beautiful and a very interesting book. Its theme is one of 
the grandest that can occupy human thought — no less than the creation of Uie 
universe. It is full of interest and grandeur, and nnist claim our readers' 
special notice, as possessing, in an eminent degree, matter for their contempla- 
tion, which cannot fail at once to elevate, to gratify, and enrich their minds." 
' — Forbes^ Review. 

' A neat little volume of mtich interest. Judging from a brief glance at the 
contents of the volume, the author has produced a work of great interest, and 
one which, while it affords the reader useful instruction, cannot fail to turn 
his mind to a very profitable channel of reflection." — Commer. Jldv. 

" A small but remarkable work. It is a bold attempt to connect the natural 
sciences into a history of creation. It contains much to interest and instruct, 
and the book is ingenious, logical, and learned." — JVewark Adv. 

J "This work discovers great ingenuity and great research into the mysteries 
5 of nature. It is a noble work, and one which no intelligent person can read 
5 without finding a fresh impulse communicated to his thoughts, and gaining ; 
\ sojKe higher impressions of the Creator's power, wisdom, and goodness." — 
\ Albany Argus. 

I " A novel and remarkable work, which will speedily attract the attention of ; 

i' all inquisitive readers. There is much that is new and ingenious in the book. 
The author, whoever he is, is a man of varied phiioso[)hical and literary at- 
tainments, and master of a style in conveying his thoughts, so pure, simple, 
and modest, that his treatise will be everywhere widely read."— JV. Y. J\i»m- 
ing IVews. 



^ 



DOWNING, ON LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 

A Treatise on Landscape Gardening; adapted to North 
America, with a view to the improvement of Country Re- 
sidences. Comprising- historical notices, and general prin- 
ciples of the art ; directions for laying out grounds, and 
arranging plantations ; description and cultivation of hardy 
trees ; decorative accompaniments to the house and grounds ; 
formation of pieces of artificial water, flower-gardens, etc. ; 
with remarks on Rural Architecture. New edition, with 
large additions and improvements, and many new and 
beautiful illustrations. By A. J. Downing. 1 large vol. 
8vo. $3 50. 

"This volume, the first American treatise on this subject, will at once take 
the rank of tlie standard work."— SiV/iman's Jutirnal. 

" Downing's Landscape Gardening is a masterly work of its kind, — more 
especially considering tiiat the art is yet in its infancy in America." — Loudon's 
Gardener's jMagazine. 

" Nothing has been omitted that can in the least contribute to a full and ana- 
lytical developnicm of the subject; and he treats of all in the most lucid order, 
and with much perspicuity and grace of diction." — Democratic Review. 

" We dismiss this work with much respect for the taste and judgment of the 
author, and with full confidetice that it will exert a commanding influence. 
They are valuable and instructive, and every man of taste, though he may not 
need, will do well to possess it." — J^Turth .American Review. 



DOWNING'S FRUITS OF AMERICA. \ 

The Fruits and Fruit Trees of America ; or, the culture, pro- <, 
pagation, and management, in the garden and orchard, of \ 
fruit trees generally ; with descriptions of all the finest | 
varieties of fruit, native or foreign, cultivated in the gardens 
of this country. Illustrated vi^ith numerous engravings and \ 
outlines of fruit. By A. J. Downing. 1 vol. 12mo., (and j 
abo 8vo. \ 

*^* This will be the most complete work on the subject ever published, and \ 
will, it is hoped, supply a desideratum long felt by amateurs and cultivators. \ 



I ROME IN 1843-4. I 

i Rome ; as seen by a New-Yorker in 1843-4. One vol. 12mo. 
I with map, and very handsomely printed. Price 75 cents. 

I Contents. — Saint Peter's — the Forum and Coliseum — the Capi- < 
\ tol — Churches, images, reliques, and miracles — A day among the | 
I tombs of Rome — The Vatican — Christmas at Rome — The palaces ^ 
\ of Rome — Ancient baths and modern fountains — A Roman dining- ( 
< house and cafe — The Velabrum, Ghetto, and Trastevere — Car- ^ 
; dinals, monks, beggars, and robbers — A promenade on the Pincian s 
^ Hill — Sculptors and painters — The modern Romans — Appendix c 
I — How to see Rome — The Duomo of Milan. > 

" This is one of the most admirable books of the kind we have ever read, i 
Its most marked characteristic is perfect taste, and this is conspicuous in every I 
part of it, preface and contents, style and typography. The descriptions of the i 
various objects of interest are clear, accurate, and in the highest degree pic- < 
turesque and pleasing. The book must commend itself to every cultivated i 
mind ; less, perhaps, by any strikingly new ii\formation which it contains, than i 
by the chaste and refined spirit which pervades it." — JV. Y. Courier and En- > 

> quirer. |; 

\ " The present work is so unlike any of its predecessors that we have met { 
] with, that no one need hesitate to purchase it, on the ground of its being a '< 
\ repetition of what is already familiar. Its style is simple and graceful ; its ' 
\ descriptions exceedingly graphic and striking ; and every thing is brought out ■ 
} with such life and freshness, that the reader, by a slight effort of imagination, ■ 
\ becomes the author's companion, during his sojourn amidst the desolations and '< 
\ glories of Rome. It is altogether a delighttul book." — Albany Jlrgus. 

\ "This elegantly-printed volume cannot fail to be read by thousands, and 
5 read with delight. Our authoi has vividly and succinctly portrayed whatever 
\ people usually go to Rome to see, or read travels thither to learn. His letters '■ 
] may be read with pleasure by the thorough scholar, as well as by the eager '• 
\ devourer of all that is new." — JV. Y. Tribune. 

s " Whoever wishes to obtain a close and familiar view of Rome, will get it \ 
\ nowhere better than in this work. Mr. Gillespie has looked upon the city ' 
S with the eye and heart of a scholar. He enjoys Rome, and this very enjoy- 
\ ment of his communicates itself to his writings, and he involuntarily puts his 
\ readers in a state of feeling to enjoy it with him." — Democratic Review. 

\ "We know so well the mental qualities by which the book is guided — the 
] elegance of taste, purity, and good judgment — that we are scarce prepared to ■ 
^ criticise it as a new book. Mr. Gillespie has gone to work like a tranquil | 

> scholar and lover of art, and has toned his book from the second stage of his ; 
\ JHipressions rather than the first. His vtews, of course, are more reliable, and, ' 

without further comment on the quality of the book, which is in all respects \ 
admirable, we extract," &c. — JV. Y. Evenivg Mirror. \ 

" This is a very agreeable book, written with an ease and fluency that make ; 
it quite delightful. The author states what came under his observation and < 
his impressions with an earnest freedom, which assures the reader that what ; 
he is perusing is characterized by truth. Every subject, apparently, of interest \ 
has been touched upon, in a manner sufficiently full ; and yet the description is j 
marked by a conciseness which gives the work an advantage over many others < 
of a similar nature." — JV. Y. Albion. j 

" We are exceedingly pleased with this book, because the author is above \ 
the conventional mode of thinking and describing. He tliinks for himself, and^ 
he speaks frankly ; moreover, he is a close observer, and is evidently possessed \ 
of taste and discrimination." — JV. Y. Anglo-American. \ 

"The writer describes and relates with a vivacity which gives his subject, \ 
trite though it be, an aspect of novelty." — JV. Y. Evening Post. \ 



^ 

^ COURSE OF ENGLISH READING. 

A Course of English Reading, adapted to every Taste and 
Capacity, with Anecdotes of Men of Genius. By Rev. J. 
Pycroft. With corrections and additions, by J. G. Cogs- ; 
well, Esq. 1 vol. 12mo. Price 75 cents. 

" It is rare to meet with a work so well fitted to aid in the acquisition of 
knowledge as this ; indeed, we have never seen any similar directory to an 
i E»glish reader, that seemed to lis to compare with it, either in respect to its 
\ fortunate arrangement or general felicity of execution. We would recommend 
I to every young person wlio intends to give any attention to the culture of his 
I mind, to keep this hook by him as a constant guide ; and persons of any age or 
' any profession, will find it as a book of reference quite invaluable." — Albany 
\ Religious Spectator. ^ 

\ "This bonk is eminently fitted to he both popular and useful. For want of 
J soma such guide as this, a large part of the reading, particularly of young per- 
5 sons, is to little purpose ; and many who deservedly acquire the cliaracter of 

> great readers, really acquire very little as the fruit of their reading. The pres- 

\ ent work v.-ill not only relieve the mind that is doubtful what course of reading ; 
\ to adopt, or that has been unable to find any satisfactory coui'se marked out, ' 
^ but it will contribute to arrange and systematize the mind's acquisitions, so 

> Ih^t they shall he at command whenever they are needed. It will be found 

) an admirable work of reference, not only for students in the course of tkeir ; 

> education, but for professional men, and for all who wish to know what the ; 

> greatest and best minds have tliought on the most important subjects." — \ 
\ Albany Argus. 

> "This work is designed to enable the student to select such works as will 
; most rapidly advance his knowledge of any particular branch or subject of 

,' literature, the arts, &c. It may be profitably consulted by all who desire to ■ 
] have their studies directed by mature judgment and experience." — Baltimore \ 
J American. 

\ " There is a vast deal of time spent to little purpose by almost every person 
\ who is given much to reading, from an inability to make a suitable selection of ; 
\ books. The present work is designed and admirably adapted to remedy this 
j evil, and the course of reading which it marks out, seems to us altogether the ; 
\ most judicious that we have ever met with, it not only gives the names of the ' 
? most distinguished authors in the various departments of learning, but fur- \ 
{ nishes hints by which the read.er may judge of their comparative merits. To ; 

< the professional man, as well as to the student, the work will be invaluable." \ 
\ — Daily Amer. Citizen. 

\ " A volume which we can conscientiously recommend as marking out an ; 
^ accurate course of historical and general reading, from which a vast acquisi- \ 
I tion of sound knowledge must result. The arrangements and system are no ' 

< less admirable than the selection of authors pointed out for study."— Xiterary ; 

< Gazette. 

\ " We do not know of a better index than this well-considered little book to ' 

< a general course of reading. It might, as such, be safely and advantageously 
\ put into the hands of all young persons who have finished their education, and 
5 are about to take their place in society, or to begin the world." — Atlas. 

i "This course is admirably adapted t) promote a really intellectual study of 
I history, philosophy, and the belles-lettres, as distinguished from that mere ac- 

< cumulation of words and dates in the memory, which passes for education."— 
^ Critic. 

"A most admirable and simply-arrantred work, fit to be placed in the hands 
of every young man about to enter on a course of English Reading. It may be 
profitable, in truth, to every one ; while the lively anecdotes intermixed with 
the subject-matter, render it full of interest and a.musement."—Aristidean. 



THE POETICAL FORTUNE-TELLER. 

A curiously charming hook. 

Oracles from the Poets ; a fanciful Diversion for the Draw- 
ing Room. By Caroline Gilman. 1 neat volume, beauti- 
fully printed, and elegantly bound in extra cloth, gili. 

I $1 50 

: " A most engaging and admirable work, compiled after a very singular idea, | 
! by the tasteful and talented Mrs. Gilman of South Carolina. It is a playi'ully- \ 
contrived series of chance answers to questions, suitable for amusement round \ 
an evening table. We close our long extracts with a renewed expression of ^ 
our admiration at the taste of the compiler, and the ingenuity with which it ? 
was originally contrived. The getting up of the book should not be forgotten. ? 
It is in the shape of an annual, and the best of gift books." — Willises Evening \ 
Mirror. \ 



"The gifted Mrs. Gilman has hit upon an ingenious amnsement, which she > 
conveys in this volume with characteristic taste. It is made up of selections from ; 
English and American poets, descriptive of person or character, and classified, : 
1 answers to a leading question at the head of each division. As X 



so as to form answers to a leading que: 

'diversion for the drawing room,' the plan cannot fail to please the young, or i 
those who would feel young. The book is handsomely printed and bound, ; 
aad is a suitable ornament for a centre-table." — JVorth .American. \ 

"This is a beautiful volume, elegantly printed, bound, and embellished, and ( 
has been compiled by Mrs. Caroline Gilman. It was intended originally for ' 
the fimily circle of the author, being destined as weU tn amuse .is to instruct, i 
It consists in a series of chance answers to questions, suitable for aiiiusement 7 
round an evening table. We predict for the work an une.rainplc'l success, \ 
;rits eminently entitle it to." — ^V. Y. Post. ' 



which its pleasing merits eminently 



" This very pretty and pleasant volume is designed to be used as a fortune- ^ 
teller, or a round game for forfeits, or examined as a treasure-house for the > 
thoughts of poets on particular subjects, from Chaucer down to the minor poets ^ 
of our own time and country. Questions are propounded ; as, ' What is the I 
character of him who loves you V ' What Is your destiny V and a hundred > 
others, and answers given from the poets, which are numbered. The literature \ 
of the volume is of the highest order, a;.d the most exquisite descriptions and : 
sentiments are contained in the answers. It is, altogether, an elegant book, \ 
: suitable for a Christmas or New- Year's present to one's ' lady-love.' " — Hunt's . 
Magazine. \ 

"This book, though partaking in no wise of a religious character, may be | 

regarded as an agreeable contribution, not only to the literature of the day, but | 

to the cause of huma-n improvement. Some amusement is absolutely neces- | 

sary ; and he who contrives one that is at once iinexceptionable in its moral / 

tendency, and at the same time fitted to quicken the intellect or refine the { 

taste, is to be regarded as a public benefactor. Such we consider to be the / 

^ character of this book. It consists of various exquisite selections from the r 

] most popular of the poets, arranged as answers to certain questions, such as | 

\ a youthful fancy might naturally enough suggest. The plan is new and inge- ? 

< nious, and both the literary and mechanical execution beautiful."— .y3/6any > 

S Religious Spectator. i 

\ " Here are various questions supposed to be asked by an individual concern- > 

I ing his own fortune, and all the gifted poets, not only on the earth, but in the i 

\ earth, including those who inhabit the 'Poets' Corner' in Westminster Abbey, { 

5 are put in requisition to answer them. While the book offers a pleasant i 

5 amusement to the young, it is full of bright and beautiful things, arranged wiih ( 

I exquisite skill, which render it a welcome oft^ring to a cultivated taste. It is i 

I withal decorated with every grace and charm that mechanical skill and labor | 

5 could bestow upon it." — Daily American. c 



\ THE AMERICAN HOUSE CARPENTER. \ 

'i A Treatise upon Architecture, Cornices, and Mouldings ; \ 

\ Framing, Doors, Windows, and Stairs ; together with the \ 

\ most important Principles of Practical Geometry. By R. \ 

\ G. Hatfield, Architect. Illustrated by more than 300 en- > 

\ gravings. 1 vol. 8vo. $2 00. 

i \ 

X "We make m pretensions even to the most superficial acqtiaintance with '■, 
\ the subject of which this book treats. It has never come within our vocation s 
\ to be hewers of wood, any more than drawers of water. And yet, with all our \ 
\ ignorance, we can see that this must be a book of great value to all scientific ] 
\ and practical mechani'.s. And, fortunately, we are not obliged to trust our < 
\ own judgment in the case ; for we are assured, on testimony that is worthy of \ 

< all acceptation, that it is really a work of tne highest merit, and adapted to < 
\ accomplish most important practical improvements in the department of which < 
\ it treats. It is evidently a l)oc)k to be studied rather than read cursorily, in \ 
\ order to secure the benefit which it is designed to impart." — Bait. Amer. \ 

\ " We should like to call the attention of carpenters to this work, because we 
■ know that every one who may be induced to purchase a copy upon our rec- 
\ ommendation, will thank us for it. If we take into consideration the great 
S advantage that a book of this kind is likely to he to a workman, in advancing 
\ him to proficiency in his trade, the price ($2) must be acknowledged to be but 
> tririing." — Daily Amer. Citizen. 

< " We live at a period when there is no art or science that can complain of \ 
\ being neglected by the makers of books ; and here we have one that is de- < 
\ signed to enlarge the views, and improve the taste, and lighten the labor of the < 
\ makers of houses. We can see, from turning over the leaves, that it is a < 
\ thoroughly scientific production ; and more than that, we are assured by one \ 

who knows about these things, and whose judgment may be taken without i 
any abatement, that it is a work of no conuuon ability, and ought to be owned \ 
and studied by every carpenter in the land. Books of this kind hitherto are 
understood to have been too expensive to gain a very wide circulation ; but 
this, though very neatly executed, is sold at a moderate price, and can be 
bought by everybody who has an interest in reading it." — Albany Atlas. 

" The clearest and most thoroughly practical work on the subject. It is very 
neatly ' got up,' and the price is extremely moderate." — JV. Y. True Sun. 

We have been singularly struck with the clear, easy, we had almost said 
the elegant style in which it is written — alfording a free demonstration, that 
he who thoroughly understands his subject, writes well, though authorship is 
not his trade. It is indeed a good practical work, and therefore of great value.'* 
— J^ew World. 

" This is a really valuable work, and its astonishingly cheap price brings it < 
in the reach of all. We heartily commend it." — Democratic Review. ^ 

" This work is a most excellent one ; very comprehensive, and lucidly ar ^ 
ranged." — JV. American. < 

" Every house carpenter ought to possess one of these books ; it is indisputa- < 
bly the best compendium of information on this subject that has hitherto been < 
published." — Journal of Commerce. < 

"This work commends itself by its practical excellence. It needs no other < 
recouunendation." — U. S. Gazette. \ 

" Few works of a practical kind from an American pen, will be found of a ^ 
more intrinsic value than this admirable volume ; and we feel more confidence s 
in this opinion, from the" fact of the press universally concurring in oiu ver- ^ 
diet."— JV. Y. Morning J^ews. \ 

'5&- 



CORRESPONDENCE OF SCHILLER AND 
GOETHE, 

Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, from 1794 to 
1805. Translated by George H. Calvert. 1 vol. 12mo., 
handsomely printed. $1 00. 



These " Letters between Schiller and Goethe" are a record 
kept by friendship of the habitual feelings and thoughts of two 
great puets. If the translator has adequately executed his grate- 
ful task, he will have the pleasure of opening to the American 
and English reader the richest epistolary treasure that literature 
contains. There is no other instance of affectionate union be- 
tween two men of such genius, intellect, and culture. 

"In perusing this delightful work, we gather many new ideas upon the 
writings of the great men of otlier times." — U. S. Gazette. 

"This is a beautiful volume, which literary men must always look over! 
with interest." — The JVort/i American. 

" A most delightful work, that will instruct as well as amuse." — Providence ■ 
Journal. X 

" This volume, as soon as known, must be e: jerly sought for by every one I 
for its very excellence ; the translator does not exaggerate in calling this the \ 
richest epistolary treasure that literature contains." — Richmond Times. 5 

"Those who seek into the true philosophy of great minds will find ample' 
compensation in the perusal of these letters, remarkable alike for the breadth ^ 
and variety of thought they involve, as well as the vastness of subjects, often <; 
handled by these great men with the familiarity of boys wliipping a top or< 
flying a kite. C 

"These letters are full of heart and soul — such letters as migh-t be expected \ 
to pass between two affectionate friends. They are full of the highest order i 
of genius — genius which has rarely been equalled in modern times. They are i 
full of the German mind — are marked by those striking peculiarities of though": \ 
which distinguish the Germans from every other nation on earth."— ./Jmerzcait ^ 
Citizen. i 

"Epistolary literature contains no richer treasure. To minds like theirs, ^ 
every deparUnent of science, literature, religion, and philosophy, possessed an ' 
engrossir.g interest; and in their cordial and confidential effusions, all these? 
topics are discussed and illustrated with unsurpassed profundity of thought^ 
and comprehensiveness of knowledge. ^ 

"The translator has exeoited his task as one who performs a labor that he 
loves." — Journal of Commerce. i 

"The work is one that none can read without an expansion of thought, and I 
without feeling that here is most unequivocally rebutted the scandal that I 
asserts that men of literature are deficient in hearty appreciation of the talents I 
and productions of each other." — Evening- Gazette. I 

" Every one who knows any thing of the history of modern literature, knows J 
that Schiller and Goethe are among the brightest names by which it is em { 
blazoned. And in this volume we are permitted to cr.-tch a glance at the ] 
, friendly and delightful intercourse which they held with each other, during j 
i the period in which each shone with the brightest lustre. The letters arf, ^ 
S characterized by all the ease of the most unsuspecting confidence, and by a^ 
s grace and fascination which nuist entrance every admirer of genius. They are I 
i perfectly unstudied efibrts, and show us how gracefully great minds can occa- ' 
5 sionally come down to little things. There is not a page, orscarcely a paragrnph, 
S in which we do not discover the breathings of superlative genius.'"— Mbany ] 
5 Advertiser. 



DOCTRINE OF THE RESURRECTION. 

Anastasis : or the Doctrine of the Resurrection ; in which it 
is shown that the Doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body 
is not sanctioned by Reason or Revelation. By George I 
Bush, Professor of Hebrew, N. Y. University. Second 
Edition. 1 thick vol. 12mo., well printed. $1 00. 



I Contents. — Introduction. — The knowledge of revelation pro- 1 
^ gressive. — Part 1. The rational argument — Objections to the com- i 
) mon view — Distinction of personal and bodily identity — The true < 
\ body of the Resurrection, as inferred by reason. — Part 2. The \ 
i Scriptural argument — Preliminary remarks — The Old Testament \ 
\ doctrine of the Resurrection — Onomatology ; definition of terms — \ 
\ Examination of particular passages — New-Testament doctrine of | 

> the Resurrection — Origin and import of the word " Resurrection," < 
\ as used in the New Testament — The Resurrection of Christ — Ex- \ 
\ amination of particular passages — The Resurrection viewed in s 
\ connection whh the Judgment — The First Resurrection and the \ 
^Judgment of the Dead — "The Times of the Restitution of all, 
\ things" — Christ's " delivering up the kingdom" — The conclusion. \ 

\ "The author occupies an important station in the University of New York^ ; 
5 and is advantageously ]<nown as a learned commentator on some books of th» 
S Old Testament. It would be wrong to depreciate either his attainments or his 

> general orthodoxy ; and all that the most earnest and careful exertion of his 

\ powers could enable him to do, he has evidently done, to recommend the \ 
I sentiments unfolded in this volume. Much patient .nbor and Ui-icommon in- " 
5 genuity have been brought to bear upon it. There is also a spirit that cannot ? 

> fail to be attractive — a spirit of candor and modesty, combined with indepen- < 

> dence. Educated young men, fond of novel and critical disquisitions, and stu- ^ 
5 dents of divinity who are anxious to prove all things, will wish to make \ 
I themselves acquainted with its contents." — London Baptist Magazine. < 

> " The deep and universal interest excited by the appearance of this most abl? < 
I work, has already demanded the issue of a second edition. The promulgation \ 
] of the theory maintained so learnedly and cogently by the author, has given < 
? birth to a sharp and somewhat bitter controversy among theologians; and we \ 
^ are sorry to see that the ill-will engendered has, in some instances, led to the < 
J impeachment of the motives of the writer. This can never be justifiable, and \ 
\ is, in this case, most unfounded and unjust. No one who knows Professor \ 

Bush, will doubt for an instant the perfect conscientiousness of all that he \ 
has written or said: and the very strong and Vv'ell-considered argument by ^ 
which he supports his position, will require something more, by way of \ 
answer, than the aspersions to which we have alluded." — JV. Y. Courier. \ 

"Prof. Bush deserves the highest commendation, for giving psblicity to his < 
T'.ews of this important Scriptural truth. These views differ widely from those 
commonly received by the religious world ; and it is rare, indeed, to meet with 
the boldness which has been exhibited on this occasion. We believe the au- 
thor must possess, in no common degree, that rare and precious quality— _^(Zc^ 
tty to one^s own convictions of truth, and we heartily commend the work to the 
philosophical and the pious." — JV. Y. JUirror. 

" What we have read convinces us that Prof. Bush is a deeply-serious be- 
liever in the Scriptures, in the soul's immortality, and in future eternal rewards 
and punishments, and his theories, if adopted, are not calculated to endanger 
any one's spiritual interests."— Boston Recorder. 



FOUQUE'S GERMAN TALES. 

Undine, a Tale, and Sintram and his Companions, a Tale. 
From the German of La Motte Fouque. 1 neat volume, 
very handsomely printed on fine paper. Price 50 cents. 
» A beautifully romantic tale of the highest excellence."— Conversations 

Lexicon. 



-Sir J. 



" A delightful tale, full of depth of thought and true poetic feeling. 
J\Iacintosh. 
"This exquisite tale is quite a literary pet in Germany."— TAoTwas Carlyle. 
"Fouqu6's romances I always recommend, especially the wUd, graceful, 
and touching Undine."— SaraA .Austin. 

"The st^'le and execution of this delightful romance are very graceful."— 

Hawkins^ Germany. 

"Undine is indeed a very charming tale: it displays delicacy blended with 

; m-eat power, a heart-born truthfulness, and a divine spirit. Beauty and poetry 

! discover themselves in every page ; it has, in fact become a standard work in 

^ the department of the classical romance, and will never fall into oblivion. - 

Tliimm's Liter, of Oermany. 

'The faulfless completeness of Undine."— Fom^n Quart. Review. 
'It may well be doubted whether the wide world's treasury of faery lore 
contains a more exquisite gem."— London AthencBum. 
J "The 'Undine' of Fouqu6 is too widely known and universally admired to 
: require a word of commendation at this A&y:'— Broadway JournaL 

" No taie ever found more acceptance than Undine. . . . It is a harmonious , 
expression of the two-fold life of man; it has the frolic and whimsical grace ot ; 
childhood, with the pathetic energy of experience. It xyould vyin and touch , 
the worldling, while it embodies the thought o! the sage. —Tribune. 

" Undine is a most captivating romance, in which the natural and supernat- 
ural are so delightfully blended that the reader is easily and agreeably recon- 
ciled to this latter peculiarity in German literature. —Albion. 

'We cannot illustrate the general character of the story of ^'ntuvm better 

; than by comparing it to the poem of Thalaba. We have the ^a^e h'g ?-P'tched 

•tone of religious Enthusiasm, the same perpetual combat with the lorce and 

\ fraud of supernatural enemies and the same ultimate success ."-iTorej^n 

Quart. Review. 

" Rintram is a work of singular and curious merit There is a wild strange- 
ness in the story which fascinates the reader, and which delights while it 
surprises."— JV. Y. Commer. Adv. 

' ' Sintram' is a beautifully wild, mysterious, and startling \3\e."-Broadway 
! Journal. 

" Sintram is a wild and pleasing tale."— JVor<A American. 
' Sintram is a capital tale founded on divers traditions of Germanic customs 
! in war, festivity. Sec."— Albion. 

" This is a work of strong dramatic interest, with a moral of the^ highest 
character; it requires only to be known to become a great favorite. —J\. r 
Morninff JVews. 

" We like ' Sintram' much, and think it must soon become a general favor 
; ite."— True Sun. 

" The second tale, ' Sintram,' is a most worthy companion to ' Undine,; an(i 
we cannSu feel greatly surprised that it has never before been reprinted 
■here. It only requhes to be known to be very generally recommended. -. 
'< Evening Oazette. v^ 



HUMAN MAGNETISM. 

Human Magnetism ; — Its Claim to Dispassionate Inquiry ; 
being an attempt to show the utility of its Application to 
the Relief of Human Suffering. By W. Newnham, Esq. 
1 vol. 12mo. $1. 

Introduction — Magnetism not Satanic Agency — Not Super- : 
natural — Mode of reasoning adopted in treating the subject — Gen- '■ 
eral Remarks — On the opposition of medical men generally to the 
doctrines of Magnetism — On the applicability of Magnetism to the ' 
relief of Medical and Surgical Disease — On the Qualifications of ■ 
Magnetizers — History of the conduct of the Royal Academy of 
Medicine towards Animal Magnetism, and consideration of the 
question how far th? power of Imagination may be allowed to be 
a sufficient cause of its phenomena — Sketch of Chardel's Views — ' 
Thoughts on Energia — On Somnambulism and Clairvoyance — On 
Prevision — On Phreno-Magnetism — On Extase — Appendix. 

"This is a work resulting from deep investigation, by one who brings to the 
subject a mind well disciplined, and a fondness for the pursuit; and in a time 
when so much inquiry is going on, and so much deception practised with 
reference to human magnetism, such a work will be found useful and instruc- 
tive."— CA. S. Gazette. 

"This is a work of vast importance and high merit." — Broadway Journal. 

" It is a very valuable work, and ought to be perused by everybody." — JV. Y. 
Mirror. 

" The learned author enters upon the investigation of his subject apparently 
after full preparation. Without propounding any general theory of magnetism, 
he contends that it does not coiitravene any law of nature, and that its phe- 
nomena exhibit no distinctive tharacteristic which "has not been shown to : 
exist in nature, in some form or other. They may not be all found associated 
in any one patient ; but they have been marked and recorded in the annals of 

; medical literature. Altogether, it is a most valuable work." — JVewark Adver- \ 

\ User. 

" A hasty glance through the volume convinces us that the author under- ; 
stands his theme, has collected numerous remarkable facts, and has grappled 
with some of the strongest objections urged by the opponents of the doctrine." 
— JV. Y. Post. 

" The subject of animal magnetism has excited so much attention within the 
last few years, that any work in relation to it, from an intelligent source, can 
hardly fail to gain an extensive circulation. The present work is evidently 
from a very competent hand, and is the result of great reflection and observa- 1 
tion ; and we doubt not that it contains nearly every thing of importance that 
is known on the subject to which it relates. We think it hardly possible that 
any candid person should weigh the statements and reasonings which this > 
book contains, without coming to the conclusion, that there is at least that in 
animal magnetism which should save it from being cast away without ex- 
amination." — Albany Argvs. 

"The well-attested facts which have recently been made known both in ' 
England and America, in relation to the performance of surgical operations 
with the aid of Mesmerism, will doubtless cause this book to be sought after, - 
inasmuch as many consider the subject involved in mystery, and are desirous ' 
of investigating it. Mr. Newnham's work professes to examine the whole i 
matter philosophically, and it appears to be quite a desideratum at the present \ 
tiuie." — Baltimore American. 



I NEW WORK ON THE EAST. \ 

I Eothen ; or, Traces of Travel brought Home from the East. 5 
I 1 neat volume, very handsomely printed on fine paper. | 
\ 50 cents. { 

( Contents. — Preface — Over the border — Journey from Belgrade \ 

I to Constantinople — Constantinople — The Troad — Infidel Smyrna s 

— Greek mariners — Cyprus — Lady Hester Stanhope — The Sane- | 

I tuary — The monks of the Holy Land — From Naz-^ireth to Tiberias i 

-My first bivouac — The Dead Sea — The black tents — Passage ^ 



of the .Jordan — Terra Sancta — The desert — Cairo and the plague I 
^ — The Pyramids — The Sphynx — Cairo to Suez — Suez — Suez to? 

< Gaza — Gaza to Nablous — Mariam — The prophet Damoor — Da- \ 
, mascus — Pass of the Lebanon — Surprise of Satalieh. f 

< " Graphic in delineation, animated in style, frank in manner, and artistical in < 
I the choice and treatment of the subjects selected for pj-esentation." — Spectator. < 

s " "He has wit and humor that shed an illustrative gleam on every oliject ; 

< which he describes, placing it in the happiest relief." — Jlt/iencBum, (first notice.) \ 

< " The book is as ' light as light,' and as lively as life, yet are there in it pas- • 

< sages and scenes which would make most men grave and solemn." — AtheiKBum, \ 
\ (second notice.) 

i "This book with a bad title is wonderfully clever." — Examiner. 

i " We have seldom, in a word, perused a volume which so irresistibly claims 
"i the attention, from the first page of the preface to the finale of the wander- 
<. ings." — Mlas. 

i "If these be not poetry, and of a pure and striking kind too, we are no 

< critics." — Literary Gazette. 

i "It is novel in all its details." — Britannia. 

!, " His account is brief, but were volumes written it could not bring the actual 
\ scene more to our mind's eye. We are frequently startled in the midst of mirth 
\ by some great touch of nature — some terrible display of truth." — Kews of the 
World. 

\ "The scenes through which he passed are exhibited with a clearness, and ; 
\ stamped upon the mind with a strength, which is absolutely fascinating. The 
? whole is accompanied with the strong coiwmanding evidence of truth, and em- ; 
\ bellished with all the beauty of poetry." — Globe. 

\ " This is the sort of writing for a traveller — sketchy, vigorous, and original." ; 
? — Morning Post. 

> "A book which exerts a very fascinating effect on its readers." — Morning ; 
i Chronicle. 

I "We have rarely met with a work of the kijid, blending so successively; 
e curious and instructive information with light and amusing reading."* — fVesl- 
l minster Review. 

\ "Nothing so sparkling, so graphic, so truthful in sentiment, so poetic in 
!; vein, has issued from the press for many a day." — The Critic, 

"This is a real book — not a sham. It displays a varied and comprehen^ve ; 
power of mind, and a genuine mastery over the first and strongest of modern 
langu iges. The author has caught the character and humor of the eastern 
mind as completely as Anastasius, while in his gorgeous descriptions and; 
powe- of sarcasm he rivals Vathek. His terseness, vigor, and bold imngery 
remind us of the brave old style of Fuller and of South, to which he adds a j 
spirit, freshness, and delicacy all his own."— Quarterly Review. 

Ik 



2?^ 



>5 



THE AMBER WITCH. 



Mary Schweidler, the Amber Witch. The most interesting ! 
Trial for Witchcraft ever known. Edited by W. Meinold, 
D. D. Translated by Lady DufF Gordon. 1 vol. 12mo., 
very handsomely printed, in large clear type, on fine pa- 
per. Price 38 cents. 

"This ingenious little tale, which has been twice translated into English, is 
written by Dr. Meinold, who professes to have composed it as a practical test 
of the powers of the Strauss school to distinguish between true and legendary 
history ; and it appears that those divines have fallen into the trap. It has 
great intrinsic merit." — Brit. Quart. Review. 

We have read nothing in fiction or in history which has so completely riv- 
', eted and absorbed our interest as this little volume. If it be a fiction it is wor- 
thy — we can give no higher praise — of De Foe." — Quarterly Review. 

' A gem of modern romance." — JV*. Y. Post. 

' This work has enough of the rare and mysterious to satisfy the strongest 
craving for the marvellous." — J^ewark Advertiser. 

" A more perfect specimen of witchery in this kind of composition we have 
rarely, if indeed ever, met with." — Albany Argus. 

'This delightful work has been received in Europe with universal praise, 
and even here it has Little at stake in the way of extensive popularity." — 
Evening Mirror. 

" A celebrated work. For simple beauty of narration, as an exposition of hu- ! 
man feeling, and a record of the trials of a pious servant of God, this book is a ! 
perfect gem." — U. S. Gazette.' i 

" A work which, for the honest and sincere air of the narrative, has not in- 1 
aptly been compared by the London Quarterly Review to that of good old I 
' ilobinson Crusoe ;' and for its genuineness and truth of feeling, to the simple \ 
nature and sentiment of the ' Vicar of Wakefield,' — to all of which we most I 
fully concur." — Auburn Journal. j 

" A story of most intense interest, and the critics have been divided on the ' 
question whether it contains more of romance or of sober truth. It seems ' 
now to be conceded that it is a fiction ; but it is constructed with such admira- 
ble skill, and every character is introduced and sustained with so much grace- 
ful simplicity and ease, that it requires no small effort, in reading it, to realize 
that it is not a veritable narrative of actual occurrences. The foreign journals ■ 
are half crazy with admiration of the author's genius." — Albany Argus. ■ 

" Possesses all the lively interest of a romance, and all the external evidences 
of a truthful narrative." — Monthly Review. 

' The Amber Witch is a fine specimen of literary ingenuity. Terhaps It is 
more like a genuine diary. The picture of the girl is sweet, and the tone pre- 
served about her truly natural and paternal." — Tribune. 

" The Amber Witch equals Robinson Crusoe in style, and quite surpasses it 
in interest." — Ladies'' Garland. 

" It is one of the very few works of fiction of late years which bears about it 
the unmistakable marks of classicality. It was a memorable work in the origi- 
nal, and has been already adopted by acclamation in the English library'', 
where we may suppose the Vicar of Wakefield shaking hands with its good, 
simple-hearted pastor, and De Foe nodding approval to the excessive probabil 
ity, the vraisemhlanceoiihe style." — Democratic Review. 

"This is a choice book, full of merit, which consists in its minute, and sim 
pie, and graphic details of common life." — Cincinnati Atlas. 



